The Bees, Canto 4 Poem by Sally Evans

It is as great a miracle for bees to live through winter
as if we entertained a second life
after our end in this one. Could we enter

new warmth after that last calamity, the reaper's knife?
How can the bees know spring will come, when snow
turns all their world into a woodcut; strife

between extremes, black and white, fire and water, yes and no,
the same two options that permit computers
to work so fast, where we would be so slow.

We thrive on in-betweens. We hesitate, we are transmuters
of black and white to colours, which we love.
Sleep and distraction are our trouble-shooters.

But bees don't hibernate when winter steals the scene above,
or bide away in singles like the wasps,
their cousins and their enemies. They shove

their fellows round in circles, fan their wings, emitting gasps
and strenuously work up such a heat
as saves them in their crisis. Then the clasps

on honey cells are broken, and delightedly they eat.
Were not the honey gathered in and stored,
the summer bees our yearly garden treat,

there'd be no honey in our supermarkets to afford
and none at village shops, the local kind,
from daisies, gorse and broom, or local hoard

of clover, wallflower, heather, sage and sycamore combined.
The cloudy, white or golden kind, the runny
syrupy red or bracken gold, aligned

in sparkling pots of glass, with swirling labels. How much money
would be too much? We buy, and bear it home
into our kitchen making it more sunny.

More recondite, and even sweeter, comes a honeycomb.
A gift of a superior kind, from Jenners
of from a market where beekeepers roam

and aromatic substances, vanilla pods and sennas
are more the norm than not, and on all sides
temptation spreads it palms outfor our tenners,

blue duck-eggs, day-old chicks, wild strawberries, bouquets for brides,
wines made of elderberry, orris, sloe,
and all sorts of delicious truth that hides

its blushes in the country lanes where the intrepid go
to seek it, and perhaps they find instead
a world where sweetness bustles to and fro,

where merriness is queen of all the kingdom, and has wed
the princes of the rivers, unpolluted,
flowing to art, where cleanness finds its head

though on a par with decadence and madness, often muted
by weeds and indissoluble detritus
but growing in fresh air, and deeply rooted.

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