We Must Tell the Bees

As submitted to Blue Mountain Arts Poetry Contest Dec 2020

We have only now discovered

Our terrible transgression.

The family is new to this work

Only the fourth beekeeping season.

We did not realize.

Our souls have become

Interwoven with the bees.

We first ask for forgiveness

For our thoughtlessness, as ignorant as teens;

For our heedlessness, as arrogant as queens.

We did not understand.

We must tell the bees.

We have been mindlessly absent

walking past them each day.

We have been distracted by

The hospital’s diagnoses;

Papa has dementia; Mama has Hospice.

Our family gathered its energy ‘round her illness,

Ignoring the nudge from nature that

We must tell the bees.

Now our matriarch has gone to Heaven,

Leaving a sky full of stars, a double rainbow

And yellow butterflies on the hillside

Where her memory bench beckons.

Yet even Mama may not have known

The legend of Telling the Bees.

When an important event happens in the family,

The hives vibrate with concern,

Sensing the evolving scents from sweat to tears.

We must tell the bees.

                               Donna Lamb Bowyer