At Bar Brook, near Baslow

the moorland here is treeless,
flowerless almost, but for tormentil,
with clumped feathered grasses
and boulders of lichened gritstone;
sedge, reed and rush,
side-sprouting, line the windings
of a narrow peat-brown stream,
hung with fern, moss and liverwort

the still air's overcast,
but a few moment's sunshine
brings out a black and greenish
golden-ringed dragonfly
- grander, rarer than an emperor -
and a buzz into the midair
where two meet and mate
before settling among rushes

the circuit of their bodies
is closed, in squeezed triangle,
the male above, upright,
glistering wings on vertical edge,
the female curled beneath,
wings out flatly horizontal;
they are at ease, immobile,
without sun's electricity

after an hour, they're there
still as still, self-consumed,
in continuing double-header;
but there must have been invisible
subtle internal frictions,
since finally the female
unclasps her long abdomen
and egg-laying dibbler,

vibrates her sets of wings,
revving up, and flies apart;
the male waits, drips
a minute drop of semen,
then too revs wings, and hawks the stream,
before hanging up on view again
- a sight fit, multi-dimensionally,
for his own bulbous, peagreen eyes

© Alec Rapkin