Bees and Dandelions and Death and Honey

A poem about something I don't know how to name.

Photo by Benjamin Grenier on Unsplash

I wrote this poem when I was 27 — I believe, after reading in a novel about the custom of telling the hive when a beekeeper passes away. I couldn’t have said, then, what the poem meant; I’m not sure I can now.

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DANDELION HONEY


When she died, they told the bees,
draped the hive in black, began to pull
a thousand pungent, shaggy-flowered weeds
from the roots of rose-trees, from the choking clover;
turned up in her cellar dusty pots
of wild, half-bitter honey, nothing they could swallow,
sent it in vats to the places that feed
orphans and poets, who live by gratitude.
In a day and a night they tamed the garden,
scrubbed the cellar, of her neglect; at dawn the bees,
ungrateful orphans, rose in a cloud with a cry
like an angry spirit, left clover and rose
untasted, left in abandoned combs
the dust of wild, half-bitter sweetness.

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[You can listen to an audio version of the poem using the little widget above the photograph.]

Making. Living an oddly tended life, and making anyhow. What one might leave behind, after an oddly-tended life as a maker; who takes on the tossing-out and tidying-up when that life is over, who or what rejects the tidiness and flies away with the memory of whatever wild, half-bitter sweetness got tended and made.

… or something?

The only thing I’m sure of is, I had no business writing this poem at 27. I’m grateful it showed up anyway.