Honeybee (5 page)
Authors: Naomi Shihab Nye
When the boys are alone,
they wash the dishes with facecloths.
When a honeybee is aloneârare, very rareâ
it tastes the sweetness
it lives inside all the time.
What pollen are we gathering, anyway?
Bees take naps, too.
Maybe honeybees taste pollen side by side
pretending they're alone.
Maybe the concept “alone” means nothing
in a hive.
A bumblebee is not a honeybee.
It only pretends to be.
The cell phone in your pocket
buzzes against your leg.
It's not a honeybee though. It's just a
mining bee, or leaf-cutter, or
carpenter.
You're stung by messages from people far away.
You can't make anyone well.
You can't stop a war.
What good are you?
Bees drink from thousands of flowers,
spitting up nectar
so you may have honey
in your tea.
Maybe you don't want to think about it
so much.
Pass the honey please.
During winter, bees lock legs
and beat wings fast to stay warm.
Fifty thousand bees can live in
a single hive.
Clover honey is most popular
and clover is a weed.
All the worker bees are female.
Why is that no surprise?
Well there were so many currents in it after a time,
so many streams of voices crisscrossing above
the high pasture
when she went out to feed the horses, gusts of ringing
and buzzing against her skin. Sometimes near
the biggest live oak
she paused to feel a businessman in Waxahachie
calling out
toward his office in El Paso, a mother boarding
a plane in Amarillo
waking up her Comfort girl. Hard to move sometimes
inside
so many longings, urgencies of time and distance,
hard to pretend everything you needed was right
in front of you,
bucket and feed and fence, that bundle of hay Otto
pitched inside your gate,
that rusting tractor Juan might fix someday. You
wished everything
were still right
here
, the way it used to be,
before honeybees were in jeopardy,
when the Saturday mystery episode streaming toward
your radio
was the only beam you might ride from west to east,
before we were all so strangely connected
and disconnected
inside a vibrant web of signals, and a crowded wind.
At a Halloween party, a person dressed as a baked potato says he is a filmmaker but has recently realized he is not very interested in films. He speaks in a confiding toneâsadly and softlyâthough I don't believe we have met before. It would be hard to know. His voice doesn't sound familiar. All I can see of him, besides dark eyes, is his aluminum foil wrapper. “It's really
intense
to discover your own work doesn't matter to you anymore,” he mourns. He can't sit down, so he leans over me, where I am seated on the floor of the kitchen of someone's house, wearing a bathrobe. “What are you?” everyone asked when I entered, and I said, “Tired.” The potato says he thought about coming as a honeybee but couldn't make the wings. This is the first year he really “bonded” with Halloween and he's surprised to have had any enthusiasm for it, since he feels so discouraged about everything else. “Maybe you just need to take a break,” I say. “How did you decide to be a baked potato, anyway? It's very innovative.” Everyone else has been asking him how many rolls of foil it took. Instead of answering, he asks how it is to be a poet. Goldilocksâor is it Dorothy?âwalks into the kitchen and opens the refrigerator, revealing
an incredible heaped-up stash of foodâfruit bowls, cold shrimp, cheeses and dipsâwhere only a white door was visible before. “About like that,” I say.
Near the Atascosa County Line.
An anonymous tip.
Hello sirs, I just saw one hundred cars
Pull up to the chicken pen.
Seizure of 368 roosters and hens called a state record.
Deputies also spotted about 200 spectators.
Many scattered into the woods,
some clutching roosters in their arms.
This is my favorite line in the story.
It is hard to run carrying a mean rooster.
One mean rooster is a huge dad-gum rooster.
Why is it such a relief to read this front page story?
How many of us could gather 200 friends
for anything? Would 200 friends show
for a great violinist?
There is no pretense in this story.
Now, the neighboring story about
the invasion of Iraq, that's different.
I attended one cockfight in my life,
a pitiful bloody display, so I wandered away
toward the Sierra Nevada mountains
till everyone else was ready to leave.
On that strange day
I pledged myself further to the strange life
I have been living ever since,
away from the ring, betting on nothing,
a friend of chickens in general, friend of dust
and lost hours in which everything distant
and near falls into clearer light. I won't say
it's wrong or right but it changed everything
for me.
Lyda Rose walked through our front door and said, “Where is the sock monkey? I need him.” This surprised me. She had never shown any interest in the sock monkey before.
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We began digging in the tall basket where stuffed animals live.
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Lyda Rose said, “I am two and a half now, did you know that? Where is he?”
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We threw out the snake, the yellow bunnies, battered bears, a small eagle wearing a blue T-shirt, a camel, and the bird that makes a chickadee sound if you press its belly.
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Sock Monkey was buried at the bottom.
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Lyda Rose clutched him to her chest. “My husband!” she said, closing her eyes dreamily.
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I was astonished. “Your husband? When did this happen?”
She spoke clearly and definitely. “I thought of him and I married him in my mind.”
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She ran around the dining room clutching her husband tightly, singing the song of a chickadee trapped in a human body.
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“How great! I am so happy for you both!” I said, following her.
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She did not answer, lost in a newlywed's swoon.
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I said, “It is so nice that you love him now!”
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And she stopped dancing, staring at me disapprovingly. “I didn't say I love him! I said,
he is my husband!
”
(cardboard sign propped in leafy groundcover)
No. This is not a poop-pot, a cardiovascular rescue
device, a farmer's market.
This is not a beehive, a creek bed,
a parking lot, a back alley.
This is a frilly bush in someone's personal front yard
and that someone is
sick of it
.
Take your doggie elsewhere please.
Or we will be after you with garden shears
and shovels. Have respect for someone else's
lovely landscape dream which includes neither
a tribe of slippery snails,
your doggie,
or you.
People were biting air,
snapping with smart opinions.
Everyone wanted to feel safe,
but no one would say that.
So they tried to act right instead.
For a thatched cottage
at the botanical gardens,
safety meant having a roof
water would run off,
in case of a storm.
A man traveled all the way
from England to thatch the roof.
It's a dying art.
He worked by himself
for three whole months.
Tiny windows,
cobblestone walk,
the roof smells of clean broom straw,
fresh air, meadowlands.
Now, when we stand inside it,
everything complicated
falls away. You think whatever you like,
okay? We don't have to match.
Look how the lattice of light
falls across all our feet.
I don't know why I would tell
an outright lie
to someone I never saw before
but when she asked
Did you close this door?
in an accusing tone
I said
No, the wind closed it
She gave me an odd look
pushed the door wide open
and left it that way
I felt strange the rest of the day
walking around
with a stone on my tongue
She lived with words in a tall white house.
Hundreds of books lined her shelves.
They smelled like time, they smelled like rain.
Fanning the pages, she smiled.
I was ten when I found this friend.
Cherry pie steaming on top of the stoveâ¦
We sat till it was cool.
She lit up like a lantern when I rang.
Tell about your teachers, your work
.
Who's the bad boy again?
Have you seen that dog that bit you under the eye?
The plates were stacked beside the pie.
Her husband had died before we were born,
but she didn't live alone.
She lived with words.
1.
The hermit Justiniani walked across Europe
after refusing to take his final vows.
He walked across the colonial United States,
coming to live in a cave in southern New Mexico.
Once he walked from Las Cruces
to San Antonio
for a little visit.
Justiniani led mystical prayer gatherings,
conducted healings in living rooms,
then walked 20 miles home
to his dwelling in the cave.
People worried he might not be safe,
living alone in those wild times,
as opposed to these,
sleeping without a lock,
or even a door.
He promised to light a fire every Friday night.
They could see it from town.
When the fire didn't appear,
he was found with a knife through his back,
wearing a thorny girdle of the
penitentes
,
“another unsolved murder” of those days.
Justiniani, pray for us,
our secret sorrows,
our inability to walk so far.
Pray for the signal fires we fail to light,
that we will have the power to light them.
Pray for the battered, unchosen people.
We have not come far at all
from your time.
2.
Your diary sleeps in untranslated Italian
in a locked glass case.
When I found out about it
I went a little crazy.
I need to know
what you knew.
3.
The ceiling of your cave is charred.
Along the path, clumps of cactus, desert flowers,
chips of flint.
I stood inside, trying to imagine which way
you slept in there,
pointed out or in, listening to the echo of birds
over Dripping Springs Road.
Please grant us the depth of your silence.
We are lost inside the world.
Dear Rafik, Sorry about that soccer game
you won't be attending since you now
have noâ¦
Dear Fawziya, You know, I have a mom too
so I can imagine what youâ¦
Dear Shadiya, Think about your father
versus democracy, I'll bet you'd pickâ¦
No, no, Sami, that's not true
what you said at the rally,
that our country hates you,
we really support your move
toward freedom,
that's why you no longer have
a house or a family or a villageâ¦
Dear Hassan, If only you could see
the bigger pictureâ¦
Dear Mary, I'm surprised you have
what we would call a Christian name
since you yourselfâ¦
Dear Ribhia, Sorry about that heart attack,
I know it must have been rough to live
your entire life under occupation,
we're sending a few more bombs over now
to fortify your oppressors,
but someday we hope for peace in the region,
sorry you won't be there to see itâ¦
Dear Suheir, Surely a voice is made to be raised,
don't you see we are speaking
for your own interestsâ¦
Dear Sharif, Violence is wrong
unless we are using it,
why doesn't that make senseâ¦
Dear Nadia, I did not know about
your special drawer, you know I like
to keep a few things too that have meaning to meâ¦
Dear Ramzi, You really need to stop crying now
and go on about your businessâ¦
Dear Daddo, I know 5 kids
must feel like a lot to lose in one swoop
but we can't stop our effortsâ¦
Dear Fatima, Of course I have feelings
for your own people, my college roommate
was from Lebanonâ¦
Dear Mahmoud, I wish I had time
to answer your letter but you must understand
the mail has really been stacking upâ¦
