When I placed my eight-year-old hand
over the painted wood, I felt
and heard the deep thrum of the hive,
the bees were about their business.
Grandmother’s garden was peopled
with hollyhocks that grew higher
than my shoulders. I pushed a path
through their silent, scentless bells
and came to where the bees were boxed.
I listened to the drowsy stir
of an engine idling as
the hive settled for the evening,
and saw late stragglers, legs swollen
with pollen as they flew home.
They never stung.
She would tell me to go in as the blue sky
turned navy, while she talked to the bees
telling them her news, counting off
on her fingers, who had died, who been born,
about her troubled daughter,
and whose harvest was lost.
Grandmother died the year I turned
fifteen, she was old and ill,
no longer running her fingers in a trill over
the piano keys, no longer attending the hive.
That year I shot up past the hollyhocks,
and that same summer
a handful of pills killed my mother.
And I started telling the bees.
In Celtic mythology there was a custom of ‘telling the bees’ who would pass on messages to people who had died.
[Previously published in Stars Burn Regardless, reproduced with permission from Salmon Publishing.]
Jean O'Brien has published 6 collections of poetry with Salmon Publishing Ireland, her latest being Stars Burn Regardless in 2022. She has won prizes for her work and tutors in creative writing/poetry in places such as the IWC (Irish Writers' Centre) and at Post Graduate level. www.jeanobrienpoet.ie