Grant Clauser reflects on how hard it can be to communicate love in the human world.
—
Belly Full of Bees
A dog sat for days
at its owner’s grave
while its own ribs
showed through like field furrows.
A doe waited till evening
for its fawn to get up
from the road where a car
struck it down in the morning.
Today I watch the morning moon
still bright over Promised Land Lake,
while wind wrinkles toward tree stumps
and the island’s shore.
In other lands
people hurl homemade bombs
at children or burn their own lights
out in cobbled streets.
On my pebbled beach
a dead perch ripples
with a belly full of bees—
their legs sticky with fish juice.
It’s been a busy summer.
Rain rots the shed where bees
bed down, a garden full of weeds
and the bank gone dry.
There are things I should say
to people I love, but won’t.
Instead I write about deer
and dogs and bees.
How can we say we love
something with anything close
to the silence of that dog,
that doe, with ricin raining in another sky?
It’s complicated, they say…
you spend your life with bees.
***
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Photo by Adrienne Froemel /Flickr