Playing with Bees

So the world turned
its one good eye

to watch the bees
take most of metaphor
                        with them.

            Swarms—
                        in all their airborne
                    pointillism—
                                shifted on the breeze

for the last time. Of course,

the absence of bees
                                    left behind significant holes
in ecology. Less


                                    obvious
            were the indelible holes
in poems, which would come
                                                            later:

Our vast psychic habitat
shrunk. Nothing was

            like nectar
                                    for the gods

Nobody was warned by
a deep black dahlia, and nobody

grew like a weed.

Nobody felt spry as
                        a daisy, or blue
                        and princely
as a hyacinth; was lucid as
            a moon flower.            Nobody came home


                        and yelled   honey!   up the stairs,

And nothing in particular
by any other name would smell as sweet as—

Consider:
the verbal dearth
that is always a main ripple of extinction.

The lexicon of wilds goes on nixing its descriptions.
Slimming its index of references
for what is

super as a rhubarb, and juicy
as a peach,
or sunken as a
comb and ancient as an alder tree, or
conifer, or beech, what is royal
as jelly, dark as a wintering

hive, toxic as the jessamine vine
who weeps the way a willow does,
silently as wax
burned in the land of milk and

all the strong words in poems,
they were once

smeared on the mandible of a bee.

Copyright © 2023 by RK Fauth. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on April 29, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets.

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About the Treehouse Climate Action Poem Prize

“Making language itself a primary concern, ‘Playing with Bees’ reminds us that we are nature, just as bees are, and the poem explores the manner in which words govern our relationship with the nonhuman world. Inside that exploration, this poem becomes a poignant meditation on how we imagine both the natural world and our place within it, while also capturing some of the mystery of what exists beyond our ability to express. ”
—Dr. Peter Kalmus and Matthew Olzmann

“This poem is the prelude to my first collection, Playing with Bees, which catalogs moments in time as artifacts after a fictional bee extinction. The image of ‘the world turning its one good eye’ came to me after watching a swarm of starlings. The birds made these mesmerizing, intelligent patterns against a sunset undoubtedly made extra vibrant by light pollution. It made me wonder, what happens to my imagination, my language, my daydreams, every time a peg in the environment is removed? Without, say, bees, what of this poem would shrivel and disappear? How much of me would the bees take with them?”
—RK Fauth