I saw, in passing, along the field road today
A swarm of honeybees upon a walnut limb
Crawling over their queen, enraptured by the command of her scent
They long for the scout’s return
From his buzzing of the woods and fields
In search of a new castle for the Queen-Mother
What strange force of nature
Or invisible shift in the earth
Drove the homelessness of this swarm
For they and their kind are failing,
In our own failure, perhaps, to know
Of a change standing up in the world
On the legs of a mite-filtered virus, set free
By the modern exchange
On which the honeybee rode ‘round the world
A strange sickness, driving workers toward lonely deaths, unnatural
In fruitless attempt to save
Colony, queen , and home
Or man-made plant-borne poisons
Traced in the quickening pollen
All these impoverishing the larder of the land
But I think its something more deeply wrong in the world
A wrong marked by men creating mechanical bees
To fulfill the task of pollination
In an absence not yet come
While the honeybee dances a last dance
To the sound of the land crying
This swarm, a revelation
Of so fragile a thing as life in a grace-starved world
The clustered wings make a familiar rumbling,
Becoming too faint a rumbling to hear
10-16-2013
©2019 Lenny Wells
Thoughts From The Orchard 