Welcome to Poetic Licence – a new weekly poetry forum, hosted by us, featuring words by local poets. First up? Vancouver Poet Laureate Rachel Rose, with “Bees”.
Bees
The farmer asked me to host a hive
and I said yes thinking honey,
without the sting, thinking
do your small
part and let the bees do theirs.
The hive was a box of many rooms
hot with life.
It throbbed under its tin roof.
All summer their flight path
hung its line of light across the deck.
Those gold cells swam to the door
of the hive, dusted with lust from blossom.
If a wasp dared come, they were ready
to kamikaze down, force the intruder out
in a buzz-tussle to the death. I crouched.
I watched the stinger torn from the bee’s body
trailing cream. Even in death, bees are never lonely.
The hive is myriad.
The hive is more than the bees.
Sometimes I stood close to vibrate with them,
drone of sun, pleasure of reaching beyond the limited
human. O stamen, pistil, I let them tangle in my hair
I hung up their flight path. Then came the virus,
and then the wasps. There was no keeping them out.
I crushed a few invaders, before I stopped,
stupid human, helpless as any God
before the laws of relativity.
The farmer and I could barely look at each other
and the leaves fell and brought winter.
But can we try again? I begged, like a woman
who wakes to a bed of blood, can we try again?
The serious farmer said, Of course. The struggle
is all that keeps me here, in this plague time
where bees drop, the hive is cold, a few hornets
drift, a virus drifts, pesticides drift over lawns
lush as death, fields of strawberries so poisoned
and perfect one bite brings the sleep
of a hundred years. Can we try again?
Rachel Rose is the Poet Laureate of Vancouver. The winner of two Pushcart Prizes, she is the author of four books of poetry. Her most recent poetry collection, Marry & Burn (Harbour), was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award. Her non-fiction book, The Dog Lover Unit: Lessons in Courage from the World’s K9 Cops, is forthcoming from St. Martin’s Press. In 2017, Anvil will publish the Poet Laureate Legacy Project anthology, Sustenance: Writers from BC and Beyond on the Subject of Food, which is accepting submissions on the subject of food until April 15. For more info, email [email protected].
To submit your own poetry to Poetic Licence, email [email protected] with Poetry Column in the subject line. Include your poem, full name, contact details and bio. Only those selected for the column will be contacted.
