The Beekeeper’s Daughter
Genine Hanns
Volume 35 Issue 4, 5 & 6 | Posted: July 8, 2021
Her father’s words droned into her ear
on the tail of those bees,
whirling like tornadoes, saturating the sky
with their dark premonitions,
of floating down easy as Maywater,
their wings spread to settle
into the center, the passion red
heart of the clover’s lit blossom.
When she was a child
her father took a bee from a honey jar,
folded it into his closed fist,
and pressed it next to her ear.
It was then she heard the bee’s raging;
his bumble yellow hum.
Seduced by the bee’s dark swarm
She kept her own colony. Like an Abbess
she walked through the meadow, between the hives,
dressed all in white, as for a wedding,
her veil religiously in place,
and the melody of the bee’s madness
rose up from her well of memory.
Their anger turned inward. Turned upon her.
They stung her sleep and clawed away her days
while she furtively spilled her living blood
warm upon her pages.
Forsaking, always, the land for the sea,
into the vacuum of glass she descended
as she drifted through layers of her own sinking self,
laying, without movement, over her father’s bones,
the taste of honey clotted in her mouth.
From P. 29 Cross-Eyed Virgin on a Tightrope, 2009, Desert Phoenix Press, ICN
Genine Hanns