March 27, 2012

The air here along the ground is still this morning, but thin white clouds are waving in a wind we can't feel, waving and moving off so the thinner blue is exposed.  As you watch, the sky changes and changes, a morning of those changes and you think nothing stays the same for long.  Every new leaf is greeted by some small bird, every mote of sunlight floats down to scatter the shadows and warm whatever it touches.  A pair of black dogs running erratically and smelling everything round the corner and keep going.  The cat bolts across the yard into the cane.  Maybe it was the dogs, maybe it just had a burning desire to be in another place.  The grass looks so soft, fresh as this morning's sun, cool as the air that sinks over it.

Yesterday, it was the bees that made me take notice, that bees seem to thaw with warmth of the spring.  You don't realize how you miss hearing them until you hear them again, you don't realize how warm and welcoming that sound is.  The poem from Poetry Daily this morning is full of bees.

The Necklace

Take, from my palms, for joy, for ease,
A little honey, a little sun,
That we may obey Persephone's bees.

You can't untie a boat unmoored.
Fur-shod shadows can't be heard,
Nor terror, in this life, mastered.

Love, what's left for us, and of us, is this
Living remnant, loving revenant, brief kiss
Like a bee flying completed dying hiveless

To find in the forest's heart a home,
Night's never-ending hum,
Thriving on meadowsweet, mint, and time.

Take, for all that is good, for all that is gone,
That it may lie rough and real against your collarbone,
This string of bees, that once turned honey into sun.

(NOVEMBER 1920)

Osip Mandelstam
translated from the Russian by Christian Wiman

There is something mysterious about making a necklace of bees, would the hum of the bees persist?  Would you be able to smell the flowers they visited?  Would these be the bees that died far from home looking for a new hive?  The sound of bees fills the spring, all that industry, all that work for the new generation.  When I put honey on a biscuit, the smell of that combination brings back my Grandmother's kitchen and breakfast there in the summer where there were always bees, and biscuits, and the warm sweet smell of tea and honey.   Memory can be a potent as a bee's sting and as welcome as their honey.

Our fur-shod shadows, the squirrels are out this morning, making of each tree a highway to some place in the sun.  Bees have begun to bump the screens now, a faint ticking as they pass on to their work.  The cat, another fur-shod shadow, has trotted out of the cane and out of the yard, the sunlight a shawl across its shoulders.

For all that is good, and for all this is gone into memory, take this spring morning and enjoy it.  The sky is still changing and changing, blue and white in a wind from far off and too high to be felt, but can be experienced in the constant shifting of color.