Bee Litany
…………………Dancing
…………………Dancing
…………………Writing on air, rubbing out everything they write
…………………Jerking their letters into knots, into tangles…
…………………………………..—from “Gnat-Psalm” by Ted Hughes
When the bees creep at noontime
Bumbling over clover, drunk on summer
Slurring their alphabet of zees
Connoisseurring their stamen bouquets
Lurching high above mud-smudged slugs
Aeronautics cleanly absent of earth
Crystallize in hives of candied sun
Wings soothing in rhythm smooth white-hot
Palpitations of abdomens ripe with sting
Sleeping
Sleeping
Burning the branches black and yellow
Numbing fledglings with subcutaneous hum
Everybody everybody else’s bell clapper, lullaby
Verb reverberates into noun: love
Not mumbling, not whispering, but tuning
Into the mother lode of all throb
Into the existential center contracting and expanding
Into the supernova of the next generation
Queen, belly full to bursting
Bursting she sings
That these are the seeds of the Sea of Sweetness
Larval motes in the eye of the bee-god
That they hear the stamens
Rejoicing in rain
And the morning meadow rejoicing
And the fields plowed to a brown gloss
Rejoicing in their fetal stalks
Olive buds plumped to bursting
And the torso of stump awaiting love
A heart
Rejoicing in the amber cells
The life dance vibrating in amber cells
Heart, antenna and lung and thorax
Feet and ichor and wing
Rising
Rising
In an accumulation of galaxy
And their terrible swift swords unsheathed, unceasing
Their tiny kaleidoscope eyes
Buttoning onto blossoms
Multiply petal exponentially into mandala
Pollen-laden legs combing the clover
O little Ambroses
Driven to live by your own hymns
Driving your adoration to death
You are the devils of sweet-tooth
And Beelzebub is a lowly pismire!
Your constellation swarms the entire sky
My eyes fly to heaven and are polished
My skin beads up in molecules of bonfire
My tongue shoves forward for communion
Your singing
Your singing
Hovers among my honeycombed bones
thrummed like strings
……
This poem shortlisted for the Fish Poetry Prize, and can be found in the chapbook The Pocket Museum of Natural History by Michele M Miller – NWVS #184 (Finishing Line Press) at https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/the-pocket-museum-of-natural-history-by-michele-m-miller-nwvs-184/
Michele M Miller holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Arizona. Prizes awarded for her poetry include an Arizona Commission on the Arts fellowship, and her thesis manuscript, “The Cinderella Heart,” was chosen runner-up for the National Poetry Series, and the Kore Press First Book Prize. Michele writes and photographs in her heartland, the Sonora desert of Tucson, Arizona.
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