Half-Rack at the Rendezvouz

Half-Rack at the Rendezvouz by William Notter She had a truck, red hair, and freckled knees and took me all the way to Memphis after work for barbecue. We moaned and grunted over plates of ribs and sweet iced tea, even in a room of strangers, gnawing the hickory char, the slow smoked meat peeling [...]

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On a June Morning, I Would Head for Your Scent

This is the third themed liturgical weaving I’ve done, taking lines from many different poets and using them to create a new piece designed to be read aloud as part of the morning prayer service in the Feminist, non-Zionist havurah I co-lead. Done right, poetry makes damn fine prayer, and this way of reading with [...]

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especially wild and sweet

from Alice Hoffman’s YA novel Green Angel My sister, Aurora, could never sit still and pay attention. She chased after frogs, she trailed her prettiest dresses through the mud, she stole apples from our neighbor’s orchard, she laughed so hard whenever her snappy little terrier, Onion, danced on his hind legs, we thought she’d never [...]

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Four-word Lines

Four-Word Lines May Swenson Your eyes are just like bees, and I feel like a flower. Their brown power makes a breeze go over my skin. When your lashes ride down and rise like brown bees’ legs, your prolonged gaze makes my eyes gauze. I wish we were in some shade and no swarm of [...]

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Oh, mouth of honey

Cean Dubh Deelish Sir Samuel Ferguson Put your head, darling, darling, darling, Your darling black head my heart above; Oh, mouth of honey, with the thyme for fragrance, Who, with heart in breast, could deny you love?

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the bee is the fleur-de-lys in the flesh

from “The Fly” Galway Kinnell The bee is the fleur-de-lys in the flesh. She has a tuft of the sun on her back. She brings sexual love to the narcissus flower. She sings of fulfillment only and stings and dies, and everything she ever touches is opening, opening.

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Bees and Morning Glories

Bees and Morning Glories by John Ciardi Morning glories, pale as a mist drying, fade from the heat of the day, but already hunchback bees in pirate pants and with peg-leg hooks have found and are boarding them. This could do for the sack of the imaginary fleet. The raiders loot the galleons even as [...]

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Henri Cole – Bees

Bees Poured through the bees, the sunlight, like flesh and spirit, emits a brightness pushing everything else away except the bees’ vibrating bronze bodies riding the air as if on strings that flex and kick back as they circle the hive outside my window, where they are cheerful and careful in their work, their audible [...]

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rough, this world is. yet our soft tongues

Carol Burbank: rough, this world is. yet our soft tongues cut it open, and the sanity of honey pours out between, where meaning lives

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Joy

Joy Julie Cadwallader Staub Who could need more proof than honey— How the bees with such skill and purpose enter flower after flower sing their way home to create and cap the new honey just to get through the flowerless winter. And how the bear with intention and cunning raids the hive shovels pawful after [...]

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