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John Weston poems
Today I became
husband to ten thousand bees.
What was I doing
all my life? To welcome them,
this is the veil I shall wear.
Too close for comfort
the River Crane’s allotments
might still tempt them back.
Overnight I pray to Ra
his tears will rain only bees:
O smart particles,
overdrive orienteers
never in one place,
please be at home in this hive,
give the word ‘nuc’ a good name.
Look! There, there she is –
the blue queen, skiffing across
her busy workers:
little royal gondola
buoyant on a buff lagoon.
Now they are drowning
in my sugar-syrup feed
under the pitched roof.
Grant me time to learn, divine
avatars of common sense.
It’s an obsession
says my dear one, every time
I go to the hive.
The bees are resigned, they have
been around longer than us.
(nuc, pronounced ‘nuke’ – a nucleus colony of bees)
Here is a secret:
The bee and the word are one.
They sting on the lip
and life passes through the breath
leaving all venom behind.
With my smoker I’m
a shaman in our garden,
smudging with sage grass.
It could be Okavango
and the greater honey guide.
The bees emerging
now in early September
call on me to keep
Ted Hooper’s handbook open,
so they’ll last until next spring.
I watch them circle
to calculate their vector
set by the scouts’ dance;
then head off like loosed arrows
under the Boeing radars.
Brooklyn’s old, ocean-edge runway
is lit with toadflax,
the horizon’s bare of kettlepond, fence-reeds,
quahog, horseshoe-crab
do not reach,
no hawk marks
semiquavers in the air,
no bush
harbours the confusing fall warbler.
Dead low of the faded year.
They are like
memories scattering but when
those white scraps
blow skittering across forgotten tracts
I zoom all eye, clear
them quick for take-off,
with their named blessing
return to Manhattan’s hotspot
not fretting.
A friend sends a message
by dying
Goodbye manicured
gestures among the flags
first person despatches
blades behind the arras
Away with loft junk
under lagged pipes
Make it new take it on
step out to the rush of air and
watch your feet waft up
Open cloud canopy
spirit-level horizon
mapped carpet of earth
Count down one last
landing
Gravity’s
close hold thrown
with a roll of the shoulder