I lament the half century I failed to marvel
at this one honeybee, as the book heeds, “hovering
over a bloom then plumbing toes inside to divine
if its nectar has already been imbibed and, thus,
save precious calories for the thousand-plus
flowers each gatherer touches down upon a day. ”
It’s like the time I learned butterflies navigate
by ultraviolet light (we don’t see) and, suddenly,
felt cheated by streetlights and road signs.
Tonight, then, I porch sit until dawn so I might espy
“that June, lunar moth emerging from cocoon
with no mouth for the two weeks it flies
and seeks mates in the feintest moonlight.”
And I dream, now, of suicide prevention week
featuring those bio luminescing fish whose “glowing,
worm-shaped lips attract prey to steel-trap jaws
so they can survive the complete darkness of bottom”
Still, some friends think me a bit mad as, between sips
from the wine glass’s tulip, I wax poetic on” the humming-
bird’s heart beating twelve-hundred times per minute
from the body weight in nectar it drinks each day.”
But as I flit from the bloomed tomes of books rife
with this life-giving-science, l’ve come to bee-lieve
earth’s own looming colony collapse might be
averted if we evolve this taste to gather only the
sweet distillations of light in, say, “the small, male cuttle fish
shape-shifting and coloring into a female impersonator
who then sashays past the fighting alpha males
to mate.” And if, one day, enough of us gather
and carry—into conversation—the tupelo honey
Of “the humpback’s song echoing a whole time zone
In search of a mate,” maybe we’ll see wild reverence
as vital to survival as bees are to our food supply
for see, already, the growing fieldtrips where kids
are asked to imagine the hive’s hidden queen
laying over a million eggs a lifetime; and hear how
they jostle to be the first to press ear to the wild,
winter hive to hear the “soft symphony from the bees
staying warm, can you imagine, by alternating being
on the edge of the swarm and furiously flapping wings
to keep the hive at ninety degrees while, outside
it’s a whopping five below.” And think how
the teachers and chaperones—taking in the
children’s’ oooohhhs and ahhhs over honeybees
dancing directions to the newest lupine blooms
find themselves tap dancing–heal to toe–
on the bus ride home while wondering at all
this long-overlooked sweetness at their very feet.
—
Dennis Camire is the author of the poetry collections, Anthology of Awe and Wonder (Deerbrook Editions), Combed by Crows (Deerbrook Editions), and Stone by Stone (Finishing Line Press), and teaches at Central Maine Community College. The former director of Maine Poetry Central and the founder of The Portland Poet Laureate Program, his work has appeared in The Mid-American Review, Poetry East, Spoon River Review, Lothlorien Review, Alluvium, Amethyst, Café Review, Canary, Hamilton Stone Review, Speckled Trout Review, and on Maine Public Radio. He lives in an A-frame in West Paris, Maine. He is also the “spokes-poet” for the mom-and-pop owned company, “Soil Foods,” which farms worms for worm castings.
