Paper Angels Poem by Giles Watson

Paper angels in the parish church
Sing like ghosts of insects
Escaping cocoons of tissue-shroud,
Scaling filaments of spider-web
Toward their vault of heaven.
Their antennae have looped themselves
And fused into haloes, as they rise,
Bleached mayflies in a nimbus cloud.
Sunlight tickles them into
Subsonic stridulations, glorying
In their metamorphoses, spiring
On glued and crumpled wings:
White imagoes on frames of wire
Surveying paradise with compound eyes.