Colonies

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I had a lot of time to think yesterday, about the break up of a political group, and the ongoing painful dissolution of an intimate working relationship. And bees — I spent a lot of time thinking about bees.

Colonies
Elliott batTzedek

It is not that we can not work together.

It’s that we work as bee colonies.

Individuals, droning in shared purpose,
pausing in doorways, dancing
to give such divinely complicated directions
to the pollen
that comes and goes so quickly.

And the queen bee?
Ah—the queen bee. Well.
The colony keeps her undercover,
everything delivered to support her single task—
making more of us
and more.
There are always more and always
at some point
other queens arise and we divide,
we divide,
and some stay and some follow
to a new field.

This is a beginning,
     always beginning, a fresh start
     in an old world.
This is birth,
     survival at the most 
     fundamental level—
resources stretched too far can not suffice.
And, too crowded,
we do sting one another
more or less accidentally.

So we go off
carrying all we’ve learned
carrying shared genes, shared dreams
and remembering
how to make honey
how to make honey
how to make more of us
    and feed each other honey.

More on Earth day

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Bees are disappearing, dying in mass numbers from a disease that’s spread around the world. Bees are a main pollinator of many of food crops. Without them, blooms do not become food. To quote my friend Lierre Keith, “if you are putting the pieces together, you are starting to feel the cold chill of horror up your spine.”

Do you know that scientists studying native species of plants and animals go through cultural relics, such as poems, songs, tapestries, old recipes, to see what species were present and known to people at any one point in history?

I thought of this today, coming across these lines from Tennyson’s “Come Down, O Maid:”

…the children call, and I
Thy shepherd pipe, and sweet is every sound,
Sweeter thy voice, but every sound is sweet;
Myriads of rivulets hurrying thro’ the lawn,
The moan of doves in immemorial elms,
And murmuring of innumerable bees.

Will this one day soon be evidence of when such a thing was possible, along with thousands and thousands of poems about songbirds? Where I grew up, in Illinois, the immemorial elms were only bits of remaining rotted stumps and street names of treeless streets by the time I was a child, the Dutch Elm canopies only a story my dad told me, like the hillside that had been huge walnut trees before they were all ripped out to make rifles for WW II.

When is the last time you heard the murmur of innumerable bees? Have you ever, walking through a clover field, or lounging in the grass near wild flowers or fruit trees in the spring?

Do you, can you, notice the silence that is absence of presence?

A Poem for Earth Day

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A Poem for Earth Day
Elliott batTzedek

I wake up, drag
my ass out of bed when
the dogs’ whining is several
decibels past unavoidable and then
they cascade down stairs as I
galumph behind, then
out the back door they go
so they can pee, then
the same for me,
but in the bathroom,
where I finish and flush
and then grab a plastic bag and scoop
the cat shit and piss clumps from
the litter box, tie the bag, take it out
the front door and throw
it in the garbage, go back
to the bathroom, where a cat will be
using the clean field, and I listen
to the scratching while I wash
my hands, fill the cat food bowl then
back into kitchen to turn on
the water for coffee and fill
the dog food bowls then let
the dogs in to eat as I dump
yesterday’s grounds into the compost bucket and eat
my morning protein bar with vitamin water to wash
down the various drugs and herbs
and supplements, then let
the dogs out to poop, which I will later
put into plastic bags and throw
into the garbage, but right now I press
the French press and add
splenda and half and half, then let
the dogs back in and head
upstairs again, sucking in coffee with each
step, to check my morning email, and by
the time I address the first several electronic
urgencies and scan NYTimes online the coffee has
worked its daily magic and I go
back to the bathroom for my morning poop, which
I also flush away, and I understand
perfectly well the process
of digestion, so I know
where all this shit comes from. The question
today is where is
all this shit going cause
there’s no such place
as away and I don’t know what
I think I’m saving with that
one little compost bucket trick but
I am quite certain it is
not the Earth.

New work up – Psalms and Piyyutim

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I’m starting to upload a new section of work – more psalms about assorted subjects from my daily life, and piyyutim, or prayer poems. The latter are, so far, a genre I’m calling “collages,” poems created by weaving together words from many different poets to create one piece that is a kind of dialogue about a topic between writers of very different eras and languages. I have two of these so far, one with ocean images, and one with river images (I’m a Pisces, whaddya want from me??). I plan to have more over the next few months.

For reasons unknown, I can’t get wordpress to make a new tab for this section at the top of my home page, so you can find it here:Psalms and Piyyutim

Rumi on writing poetry

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Listen to presences inside poems,
Let them take you where they will.

Follow those private hints,
and never leave the premises.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

This is how it always is
when I finish a poem.

A great silence overcomes me,
and I wonder why I ever thought
to use language

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

from The Essential Rumi translated by Coleman Barks

Machado Last night I had a dream / has my heart gone to sleep?

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15 Last Night I Had a Dream
Antonio Machado

     Last night I had a dream--
a blessed illusion it was--
I dreamt of a fountain flowing
deep down in my heart.
Water, by what hidden channels
have you come, tell me, to me,
welling up with new life
I never tasted before?
     Last night I had a dream--
a blessed illusion it was--
I dreamt of a hive at work
deep down in my heart.
Within were the golden bees
straining out the bitter past
to make sweet-tasting honey,
and white honeycomb.
     Last night I had a dream--
a blessed illusion it was--
I dreamt of a hot sun shining
deep down in my heart.
The heat was in the scorching
as from a fiery hearth;
the sun in the light it shed
and the tears it brought to the eyes.
     Last night I had a dream--
a blessed illusion it was--
I dreamed it was God I’d found
deep down in my heart.



16 Has my heart gone to sleep?

     Has my heart gone to sleep?
Have the beehives of my dreams
stopped working, the waterwheel
of the mind run dry,
scoops turning empty,
only shadow inside?
     No, my heart is not asleep.
It is awake, wide awake.
Not asleep, not dreaming--
its eyes are opened wide
watching distant signals, listening
on the rim of the vast silence.

both from Selected Poems translated by Alan Trueblood

more on grammarians and libertines

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from Alan Trueblood’s introduction to his translation of Selected Poems of Antonio Machado

“In my view, translators cannot be divided, as they often are, into two bands: the academic and the creative. This book is, among other things, an attempt to close a supposed gap.”

“Translation, as disciplined re-creation, cannot but sharpen one’s perceptions of the many-faceted creative activity that has preceded it. […]I have sought to give Machado’s voice an English embodiment without surrendering too much of its Spanish timbre. My aim, like that of most literary translators, has been to enlarge the experience of poetry open to English-speaking readers by unblocking one more current of expression originating outside their traditional domain.”