Telling The Bees
Down in the holler where the laurel leans,
and the dusk comes soft through sycamore tree's,
we keep our quiet with the living things—
and that includes the bees in their wooden homes.
My grandmother, hands like winter bark,
wrapped in her shawl of mourning thread,
walked at dawn with a lantern spark
to whisper low that my grandfather’s dead.
She tapped the hive like knocking on a door,
gentle, as though grief might break their wings,
and said, “He’s gone—won’t walk here no more,”
the way one tells a house, or tells old things.
For bees, she said, remember the land,
they carry our names in their golden flight,
and if you don’t tell them, they’ll not understand—
they’ll sicken in silence, or vanish in spite.
So she tied a ribbon, black as coal,
round the hive like a funeral band,
and left them a crumb from the mourning bowl,
as if sorrow must be fed by hand.
And I, just a boy with dirt in my seams,
felt the air grow thick with a sacred hum—
like the bees took hold of human dreams,
and knew what loss had come undone.
Now years have bent me the way of trees,
and I speak to hives when the shadows fall—
for death, like honey, moves through the bees,
and what we don’t tell them may haunt us all.
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