The silkworm is the larva or caterpillar of the domesticated silkmoth, Bombyx mori. A silkworm’s preferred food is white mulberry leaves, but it may also eat the leaves of any other mulberry tree. It is entirely dependent on humans for its reproduction and does not occur naturally in the wild.
Sericulture, the practice of breeding silkworms for the production of raw silk, has been underway for at least 5,000 years in China, from where it spread to Korea and Japan, and later to India and the West.
The poem below was inspired by these verses from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam:
You have formed me of earth and of water,
What can I do? Whether I be wool or silk, it is
You that have woven me, and what can I do?
The good that I do, the evil that I am guilty of,
Were alike predestined by you; what can I do?
Here we go round the mulberry
The low
branches of morus alba,
with its wide spreading crown
and scaly orange-brown bark pocked
with lenticels to oxygenate and
expel
toxic gases, and lush orbicular-shaped
leaves with serrate margin:
dioecious flowers–the narrow male,
one to two inches long, the plumper
female
at barely an inch–boys and girls
in slender zigzag come out to play.
Twigs with silvery white filaments
draped with fleshy multiples of drupes,
cylindrical
fruit, akin to the blackberry, from June to August
maturing. The larva fed on this foliage,
its spittle passing through spinneret lips
so hardening to tensile-as-steel silk,
each cocoon
wound with a single mile-long thread, the oven-
baked pupas, soaked in boiling water, whence
five strands spun on wooden bobbins, the yarn woven
into the cloth of kings. So do not
hasten
to consign Emily Dickinson’s breath to dust,
nor the intemperate slobber of Walt Whitman’s
leaves of grass to the furnace, in all modesty
our poetry too is nothing less than solidified saliva.
13 April 2004
johnjosephlyons 