Pieris rapae

“It was observed that immediately after the insects
had been killed through the application of high
frequency their bodies were hot to touch.”
—Thomas J. Headlee & Robert C. Burdette,
Some Facts Relative to the Effect of High Frequency
Radio Waves on Insect Activity (1929)

What of that star-foiled moth suspended in the heart,
capped in its tubule of glass and beating, ceaseless,
at the pit of you? The homely salt-footed corpse
of Archimedes, cankered on a distant beach?
Pulsars sing the Syracusan fleet transfigured,
all-tethering round, to an underhanded light:
waves that panic the white insect. Let us be cruel
as each is wont, hooking eyefuls of God. Let us
be awed, hot-bodied in the immaculate shear
of it—transfixed as if on the beam of a spear.