Senior Reflections: The Bagworm

Not to be confused with the relatively attractive, furry, social tent caterpillar, the bagworm is a nuisance on ornamental evergreens. Nevertheless, if you think about it, this unattractive little animal is one to which a lot of us older Americans ought to be able to relate. 

(Fair use of a photo from the Missouri Department of Conservation. Inside the little bags of dead plant material are caterpillars--or are they turning into moths already? That's their business. The bags are longer than the caterpillars, with room for waste material walled off in the tapered ends, room for the growing bodies inside at the tops.)

Inch-long survivalist,

always drab, camouflaged

(she never eats the toxins

that turn skins red, black, blue, gold,

nor the succulent leaves

that give a bright green)

and brittle of skin, she builds

her camouflaged armorplate of twigs

and bits of needles, berries, moss,

glued together with her own spit.

It becomes her home, her comfort

zone, her cozy place,

and in due time the cocoon

in which she becomes an adult moth.

The female plume moth has no plumes

of wings, but is shorter and fatter

than she was as a caterpillar,

her surplus legs dissolving in pupation,

their fats and proteins forming eggs instead.

After pupation, males emerge and fly.

The female? That's not for her.

Why would she want to fly when

she has the only place she wants to be?

She stays at home.

Nobody makes her do this.

She is a solitary wild animal.

She does what feels right to her at the time.

It feels right to her to turn around,

head into her cozy place,

claws clinging to its walls,

tail end out for the necessary minimum

of social connection,

which, for a moth, means sex,

which plume moths do back-to-back.

She tolerates that much contact

while basking in the comfort of her home,

thinking whatever moths think, breathing in

the fragrance of her active youth, the memories.

A moth's life can be measured by a heartbeat

but humans do not see the tiny heart,

so the only way humans can tell

whether this moth is dead or alive

is whether she drops eggs on schedule.

After that it's anybody's guess.

Only the moth knows, and she is not telling,

when her life returns to the One Who gave it:

her life, her private life, lived her own way.