leonardcohenforum.com

Watching Honeybees Pollinate Lavender on July 4

I heave out the trash: a Glad Bag bulging
with my wife's old shoes and shoe boxes.

I lounge, smoking a cigar, pressed flat
against the Twenties wall of our apartment

house, watch tawny bees pollinate blue-purple
flowers on rain-sprinkled aromatic branches.

An ambulance rushes by, claxon blaring;
each bee circulates in its eternal duties,

oblivous that peers have been disappearing,
it scrambles to extract pollen from a floret.

Christopher T. George

The disappearing honeybees

Thank you for providing that link with your poem, Christopher. People are quick to dismiss it because honeybees seem so incidental in our world, a little buzzing yellow that has to do with flowers and honey... or so they think. It's all showing up in the worlds of other insects, as well... spiders and such. Different effects. Crucial information.

I like all the contrasts and realities in these lines. Would never have thought to so aptly call them peers.

An ambulance rushes by, claxon blaring;
each bee circulates in its eternal duties,

oblivous that peers have been disappearing,
it scrambles to extract pollen from a floret.

~ Lizzy

Thanks, Lizzy. Yes this could be a cataclysm in the making, yet another marker that things are going wrong. And you are right - we take so much for granted though life in general and the ecosystem are in reality so fragile and precious.

Chris