The Beekeeper in Park Slope
The Beekeeper is a kind of Placekeeper
Self-sacrificing sterile worker bees are foraging in public places
In rusty dumpsters
In proximity to rats
The Beekeeper is bereft--will they return?
Or will they do the robbing dance
It is completely natural
The buzzing in my ears is the message
that they are returning to the Beekeeper
His colors are drawing them
The magnetic fields are drawing them
They circle back, with news of sweet sources
They are home
Family
To raise a child
from complete dependence to human self-reliance
provokes regret for the marching of time
from girlhood to womanhood from boyhood to manhood
we are still debating
whose child is this
Aging
I am aging
I sat in the bright light today and aimed the mirror into the sun
revealing a wrinkled throat that I knew might be there
I just hadn't looked in a long time
In the same way, I hadn't examined age and its imperatives
I like.
ReplyDeleteMy favorite is "Aging". It speaks to me most personally, and is your most personal voice, too.
I hadn't remembered DH Lawrence being cerebral. I remember him being passionate about sexual politics. Sexy bees. Are you reading something by him recently?
I like exploration of emotion in poems, that's my bias. I get the beekeeper being bereft, but when the bees return, I wish I saw what he(she) felt.
I wrote this and then realized it was very much in the spirit of Lawrence. Actually the beekeeper I know said I got my facts wrong, the workers are asexual. I have to update this somehow to reflect scientific accuracy (yawn). meanwhile, http://www.cswnet.com/~erin/dhlpoem.htm
ReplyDeletethanks for the link to his poems... at a quick perusal, they strike me as self-examining, personal, and passionate. You only appear in your 3rd poem.
ReplyDeleteMore fun and meaningful to imagine the bees as sexual, don't you think? Makes a better poem. If you made them asexual, it could hardly be in the style of D.H. Lawrence?
hey, I made a Kindle version of Erin's selected D. H. Lawrence poems today.
ReplyDeleteOn further examination, I see more of the similarity of your poems, in structure. I'm a big sop on content, so just ignore me if I don't 'get it'.
I changed two lines after educating myself a little further. There are two castes of females, the queen and the worker bees, which result from fertilized eggs. In the Larvae stage, they are fed differently which brings about the differentiation. Drones are always the result of unfertilized eggs-- parthenogenesis. Won't the beekeeper be proud of me?
ReplyDeleteI like the improvement!
ReplyDelete