Honeybee

by Naomi Shihab Nye

  Look at this boy on the cover

  of the magazine, with head in his hands.

  What happened? He’s called “a kid

  whose village was destroyed,” but

  I don’t think he’s a kid anymore.

  Culture of Life

  George W. Bush believes

  in a “culture of life.”

  This is very interesting to those

  who have recently died

  because of his decisions.

  They discuss it regularly.

  What could they have done

  differently

  to be alive?

  If only they had been born

  in another country

  or lived in a different neighborhood,

  the culture might have included them too.

  Actually they liked life a lot.

  They can’t stop thinking about

  their teacups and blankets.

  The scent of sheep wool

  in a warm room.

  Click of almond shells

  in a bowl.

  That simple coming-home feeling

  when someone happy to see you

  greets you.

  Never could they have imagined

  being dead and thinking about teacups.

  Missing Thomas Jefferson

  I am looking for a cry that feels big enough

  A wind a mountain a grove of cypress trees

  A human being saying something true

  Not:

  I will kill you today

  So someone has a better life tomorrow

  If we heard the cries so much like our own

  The wailing I-am-burned sounds

  I-am-nearly-dead-and-gone sounds

  Who could keep blasting?

  Help Me

  Don’t Hurt Me

  This story has

  No good parts in it

  How many are desperate for a day of no explosions?

  A sentence without someone’s blood

  At the end of it

  Desperate for one wise person

  To stand up bigger than rubble

  And stop the rubble

  What a lonely time we live in

  Thomas Jefferson said I not only write nothing on religion but rarely permit myself to speak on it…. The genuine system of Jesus and the artificial structures they have erected to make them the instruments of wealth, power and preeminence to themselves…

  I am looking for the human who admits his flaws

  Who shocks the adversary

  By being kinder not stronger

  What would that be like?

  We don’t even know

  Only the innocent shopkeeper led away in chains

  The child drawing a dove

  The mother bathing burned skin with a feathery cloth

  Only they deserve the podium

  A grace note and someone to sing it

  “I’ll be nicer to you than you are to me”

  Everything we worked for

  Every ethical tradition

  Every bridge

  More time to ease things out than to break them

  Dipping into

  Modern Eloquence

  Volumes One Through Nine

  Published 1900

  I kept thinking how far

  How far

  We are

  From there

  Don’t Say

  God said.

  You made it up

  then put it in God’s pocket.

  God may have thrown it out already.

  Running Egret

  We want our nature to have a face.

  An eye we can look into,

  not like ours—clearer. Strong body

  moving swiftly over land, belonging to no one.

  Nonpartisan egret,

  beyond everything that burdens us,

  unexpected, unpredictable,

  sheer motion—flash of white—

  creatures with a silence

  wider than our own.

  There are days we wake and need an egret.

  Lion Park

  Outside Johannesburg, the driver named Samuel and I drove slowly between vast meadows of zebras and small clumps of distant beige lions snoozing on their backs under trees. He said to me, “You want to do my favorite thing? We’ll stop where there’s no lion. And we’ll stare out the window very patiently. All the cars behind us will stop, too. They will want to see what we see. And they will not be able to figure it out. We will point and their eyes will go where we point. If we wait long enough, something good may come into view. It is what I have found from my years of driving through this park. Stop where there is nothing to see and wait. Then you see something better. And trick people in the meantime.”

  “Fine!” I said. What a guy!

  We stopped where there was nothing but a thirsty clump of grayish bushes and a puddle. And the car filled with Japanese travelers behind us stopped, too. And we pointed and peered. We did not open the windows as it is very important in lion parks not to open the windows. Everyone had mentioned the father who jumped out to take one quick picture the year before and was gobbled down in front of his kids. We pointed and the people behind us stared and stared. They looked curious and frustrated. A few clouds floated by. And then, under the wide South African sky, beside the scraggly bush, just as Samuel had predicted, a white lion stepped forth daintily from a shadowy hiding place, stepped right into the road beside us, ignoring us as if we were not there, and began drinking from the puddle in the road with a long lion tongue. We could see the ripples of muscle under her skin. We could count the toes on her feet.

  The Little Bun of Hours

  Days that felt like sheet cakes in long silver pans

  frosted or not, plenty of cake no matter

  who appeared,

  a sift of powdered sugar, and the knife

  laid casually by. Maybe a sack of French bread

  broken in half. I liked the small stacked plates

  on the counter, the way you drove around in a box

  without going anywhere. We could send

  the bears to school and write notes for them

  to take home to their mothers, who were camels

  and rabbits. Sometimes I looked at a clock.

  When you were four, lightning cracked my brain

  and I could see all the way till now, this fist of days

  before you leave. It took away my sleep,

  my confidence,

  who were we before you? Though of course

  there had been more of those years….

  When Cyrus says, “Just don’t breathe down his neck,

  okay?”

  I am hanging onto the little bun of hours,

  wrapping it in the softest napkin,

  tucking it into every pocket,

  though you don’t see it, you are never hungry

  now. The locusts thrumming their summer blues

  sound old.

  If Jesus had died by an axe, would Christians carry axes around?

  You always asked the best questions.

  This conversation is not finished.

  Remember how the stories had many endings,

  you laughed when we changed them.

  Take your laundry baskets, your first-aid kit,

  but don’t take my failings, okay? Forget the times

  I snapped, or had no patience, okay?

  And I will try to remember

  when you liked me more than when you didn’t.

  It is the butter on the bread.

  Pollen

  Sometimes in the mornings

  a sense of knowing tickles my windows,

  mechanical thud outside,

  gears shifting, engine waking up

  like a bee doing its waggle dance

  in front of the hive.

  Even if I don’t know what that yellow machine

  means, exactly, it companions me.

  Man in a bucket,
examining high light,

  repairing wires nibbled by a squirrel.

  The world’s at work in the hopeful hour,

  things put together

  won’t be blown apart,

  dissolve or disappear.

  Did you know bees ventilate their homes

  by hovering outside and fanning their wings?

  Light passes through thinking,

  helps us find the field again.

  Honeybees Drinking

  When did your language spring alive? At two, single words chipped awake, precious gems in the cave of the holy mouth. Pajama could hypnotize. I lay on the grass beneath the clothesline’s flapping pajama pants singing sweet three-buttoned glory, a nectar in the remembering and repeating, till lost in bliss. Like a swoon in a flower, basking, collecting…Someone nodded, responded, recognizing the fat little bee-body of syllable, yes, yes, she said it, did you hear what she said? Words and voices, hovering, dipping down…how few people we know in the beginning. Parents, grandparents, vegetable man, the woman called Caroline at the farm up the hill, pronounced like “line”—a clothesline in her name. Big blue-jean pants were strung on it, no flowery aprons. She sold strawberries in little pint boxes, shooed chickens, arranged zucchini by size. She said she didn’t love the farm, though, didn’t even love vegetables, she only loved the man who loved it. Wrap a word in another word…so she lived with him and worked the ruddy acres, in the steaming heat. Heat felt pointed in those days—it had a nose on it. Things would be made clearer as years went by—the level of irony one voice can contain. Sometimes, the voices around you were voices in your conscience. Does it sound like anyone you know or is it only yourself? Caroline’s odd frank voice was one of mine. It never dressed up. It told things directly, beat-down hoe to a clump of earth. Humph! She bent over in muggy field laboring hard under sun till she couldn’t stand up straight anymore, and of course her farmer husband died first and left her with the acres. Insult upon injury. Now what? By then you’re devoted to the system, you can’t just move. Tangle of blackberry vines, ruin of beautiful barns, battered crates, fourteen cats, ripe compost, and the white delivery truck with ORGANIC rusting off the side.

  Fifty years later her fields are overgrown except the one in which a man from down the block is growing pumpkins and sometimes I fly over them. I look down past the ragged line of trees just beyond the airport and see them, rumpled, marked with the lines of old crops and weeds. And the tears roll out of my eyes streaking the inside of the airplane window. I still call her on Sundays sometimes to say, “What’s up? Is anything up?” which is really strange if you’ve been doing it so long and especially if you’re calling someone on a farm. Usually she says, “Not a thing.” Then tells me some disappeared cat or barking dog story. But one day she says, “You know what? Everything was so dry this year that the poor honeybees were drinking water out of the cats’ water bowls under the chins of the cats. Can you imagine? I never even knew bees drank water, I thought they just drank flower juice. How desperate they must have been! Sneaking in under the big tongues and teeth of the cats like that?”

  Weird Hurt

  Because the person behind me on the plane kept kicking my seat, across the long striped blue/brown geological wonder of Colorado to California, I turned around to stare at her finally through the crack and somehow pulled a muscle in my leg. How someone can strain a leg muscle while not even standing up beats me. But it definitely follows the usual pattern of getting hurt when we are rushing, jostled, distracted, mindless, otherwise off the beam. I was distracted in the plane. Trying to read a book and bumping. (Last summer I broke my little toe while running to answer a telephone on the eve of leaving to Scotland—a hiking tour became a hobbling tour in one swift second. A hammer once fell on my head off the top of a ladder when I was planning a small person’s birthday party. Jostled, distracted…)

  Pay attention takes on new meanings out in the world.

  Honeybees have been hauled all over agricultural creation by their owners in wooden hives to pollinate flowers far from the ones they grew up with. Even if they only grew up a little while ago. Honeybees live and dive and drink in the same fields where poisons are sprayed. To escape decline for any time at all would seem like a miracle. Incidentally, to call a time in history a “time of war” when there would not have been a war if you did not make one seems somehow disingenuous—it was hardly inevitable, as a severe thunderstorm might be. Bees are fine in severe thunderstorms, apparently. Could the bees with their profound radar beams and personal sensitivities be mirroring the disarray in the world of humans? Watch your step. Mind your head. A news story about movies for last season announced proudly, “HORROR/SLASHER FLICKS TO FILL YOUR SCREENS.”

  We Are the People

  always going somewhere else. What is this peculiar attribute of our households, our days, our nation? We will not be here long enough to get tired of it. Does this make us less responsible? It’s that relationship you have with a towel when the towel belongs to a hotel.

  If we can’t go anywhere else, are we more encouraged to enhance and protect the place where we are? Hmmmmm. Bzzzzzzz.

  We should do all we can to stay out of jail, but now and then it is quite uplifting to pretend we are under house arrest.

  I heard, if you spend less time at work (does this apply to school, too?) you do better work while there. Concentrated bursts enhance performance. Drop all the prefacing and wrap-up, and more gets done.

  The frogs under the bridge in the Cairo park after dark had the best singing voices I have ever heard with frogs. They were not on tour. They sang that way every night, on the rim of the great city, its fabulously jumbled markets and shining domed mosques. The frogs were harmonizing, resonating so loudly you could feel a multi-layered frog chorus through your feet as well as your ears. Took a minute to realize it was frogs. It could have been buried bulldozers. With really well-oiled engines…I was still carrying my South African sugar packet with wisdom printed on it, “From contentment with little comes happiness.”

  In the old days, honeybees found their own pastures and meadows, clumps and clots of pollen. In the new days, their hives were carted by farmers here and there, intentionally. The bees were rented out. How this affected their stability and general constitutions may only now be emerging with the sudden total disappearance (no corpses) of a large number of honeybees in the world. I mean, if you get rented out, what does that do to your willpower? If you get carted around, what does that do to your radar?

  I know people who, the minute they get into their homes, tell you where they are going next.

  I am one of them.

  This is nothing to be proud of.

  I am trying something out. Where are you going?

  Nowhere, nowhere at all.

  It feels like an aberration.

  But a certain calm descends upon the house.

  One evening, after remembering there used to be a lovely thing in the sky called a “sunset,” I trundled to my front porch, sat on the top step with an icy glass of freshly squeezed limeade, some crushed mint leaves thrown in for good luck, and waited. The western sky rumpled and heaved, brewing elegantly, turning over, graying and pinking all at once. Maybe it was too cloudy for a sunset. Cars rolled past, going home from work. What a comforting, sometimes lonely hour.

  Streaks of red shot out from behind the gray rumples. My neighbor walked past with her dog. “What’s wrong?” she called. I said, “What? Nothing.” She said, “Why are you sitting there like that?” I pointed at the sky. She looked at it and shrugged. “Oh. You look locked out.”

  So ask yourself, you swirling tornado of a human being, in a world of disoriented honeybees, do you want to look locked out the minute you sit down?

  I ask you.

  Help with Your Homework

  Her e-mail message asked me please to write a two-or three-page essay on one of my poems. She would pick the poem. Then she said, “Please do your best work—this is half of my grade.”<
br />
  I kid you not. And she was a community college student, not a child.

  We cannot begin to count our friends and helpers. Although I did not turn out to be her helper after all (hadn’t I written the poems already and wasn’t that my part of the homework?), I have no doubt she enlisted someone else. She had that air and tone. Some drones are so lazy they lie around in the beehive all day waiting for another bee to feed them. Passage of mind from thought to thought. Crevices of honeycomb stroked with sweetness. Zip zip how long can we hover in any one zone? The zen abbot suggested we try to drop our inner commentary as we took a hike up the hill to the memorial ashes site of Suzuki Roshi. Oh, but how deliciously and tenaciously the chatter stuck to the inner tiers of our brains. Later, meditating on a pillow, I absorbed the swishing of latecomers, the snuffling and sneezing of the sitter two pillows down, as hard as I tried to ignore them. (Why do people with colds always sit near me?) Buses on the street made heavy braking sounds at corners, but back in the mind’s hive, chips and glimmers of language and emptiness sashayed gracefully side to side.

  Busy Bee Takes a Break

  All the theories about the disappearing bees omit one possibility: they are sick of the word “busy.” They are on strike. Sure this cycling and collecting and producing is what they’ve done for so long…worker and queen and drone…blossom and hive and comb…but the last thing the bees want stuck in their pollen baskets is a cliché. Busy? Not I. We can’t even know if they adore the fragrances of flowers…but they must, right? Let’s hope so. Let’s hope there’s pleasure in it.