Insect ID
“Found this in the yard. Do any budding etymologists [sic] out there know what it is?”
—Post, with photo, on Nextdoor.com
Would some fine etymologist
identify this bug?
It might just be a scorpion!
I know it’s not a slug.
From “bwg“—it’s Welsh—think “bugaboo”—
it frightens in the night;
hence, “bedbugs.” That’s no bedbug there—
I know that can’t be right.
Bugs have six legs. This thing has eight.
A giant spider! Eek!
Arachnid—like the weaver-girl
Arachne, from the Greek.
What you’ve got there’s a common
jumping spider on a leaf:
Sassacus vitis takes its name
from an old native chief.
But “entomon” and “etymon”
are nothing like the same:
one asks what’s in a crawling pest;
one asks what’s in a name.
D. R. Goodman is the author of Greed: A Confession from Able Muse press. Twice winner of the Able Muse Write Prize for poetry, and 2015 winner of the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award, her work has appeared in such journals as New Ohio Review, THINK Journal, Whitefish Review, Crazyhorse, and many others; as well as in Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry, and in the anthologies Extreme Sonnets (Beth Houston, editor) and 150 Contemporary Sonnets (William Baer, editor). A native of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, she now lives in Oakland, California, where she is founder and chief instructor at a martial arts school.