it was ten years

One year the Japanese beetles came like prisms,
oil-slick beauty crowding over the thistles like dark pearls
at the edges of our property.
They dug out the unused field--
bulldozers, not beetles,
though the effect could have been the same--
and red dirt came from under the alfalfa and dried in the sun,
studded with all those glass-backed beetles,
blue-green and violet and voracious.
(I was ten years old.)

I watched them as I dug stones out of the earth
barefoot and reddish, crouching in the open dust,
and they wove over and around each other
with immunity and iridescence.
And here is what I knew:
that this was only once.
Years would come and there would be plagues,
blue beads settling over our property.
They would devour our tomato plants and cluster over the peaches,
and we would kill them by the thousands
in those plastic bags on the clothesline.
But now was only once,
in new deserts with cement curing and nails scattered
and nothing planted yet,
and this time they lived
so we could see them.
(It was ten years ago now.)