Bees dance fast, like Sufis.
Their spinning poetry
describes a transient
memory map. The five-tier hive
in our doctor’s garden
wavers in and out of focus,
a white pagoda
behind a moving flame.
The bees keep leaving,
keep arriving
with their sweet
mouth-to-mouth offerings.
Inside, in darkened hexagons,
they go about their science,
transforming matter:
nectar gilds to honey, slows
to wax. Honey swells larva,
larva brittles into pupa,
pupa wakes to bee,
each change a twist
of the sugar-wheel.
When he opens the lid,
There’s a wave of perfumery.
It smells like a shop
in the Avenue
des Champs-Elysées; thrills
like love.
The hive hums like a pylon.
Out whirls a generation.
© Alex Josephy
Picture 12696408, painting by Friedrich Wilhelm Kuhnert, image copyright Mary Evans / Biodiversity Heritage Library/Science Source
Alex Josephy lives in London and Italy. Her collection Naked Since Faversham was published by Pindrop Press in 2020. Other work includes White Roads, poems set in Italy (Paekakariki Press, 2018) and Other Blackbirds (Cinnamon Press, 2016). Her poems have won the McLellan and Battered Moons prizes, and have appeared in magazines and anthologies in the UK and Italy. As part of the Poetry School Mixed Borders scheme, she has been poet-in-residence at Rainham Hall, Essex, and in Markham Square, London. www.alexjosephy.net
Choose PDF type:
