The Last Buzz

James Grigg
2 min readApr 19, 2023

A poem on the quiet demise of insect life.

Photo by the author

A thousand thousand bug and flies,
Buzzing, flying, landing in your eyes,
This was the norm, it was a pestilence,
It was nature’s enduring dominance.

A hundred thousand bugs and flies,
They seemed so many, who noticed their decline?
Still abundant, still kept busy,
The wild continued to seem fizzy.

Ten thousand remaining bugs and flies,
They eat and excrete, they seem in high supply,
They connect ecology from birth to death,
But the warning signs were no longer bereft.

A thousand left of those bugs and flies,
Their dwindling numbers start to be defined,
The ecosystems have begun to crumble,
But we didn’t care, or feel at all humble.

A hundred remain of the bugs and flies,
Pollination fails, the world begins to die,
Predators go hungry, rotting flesh amasses,
But our species ignores, as the food web crashes.

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James Grigg

Artist, environmentalist, vegan, feminist, atheist, nudist, cyclist, chocoholic, trekkie. Interested in issues of sustainability and equality — JamesGrigg.com