I came to tend the hives when I was young,
A widow’s daughter learning widow’s work.
My mother taught me how the smoker’s tongue
Could still a thousand furies with its murk.

She taught me how to read the waggle dance,
Whose urgent spirals chart where blooms still thrive,
How every forager’s ecstatic trance
Spun honey into being, hive by hive.

My mother died in August, stung too often.
Her body had grown weary of forgiveness.
I wrapped her in a sheet and built her coffin
From pine boards bleeding their slow golden witness.

The village cast me out beyond the fen.
They feared my bees, their hunger and their hum.
I walked through mist alone, spoke not to men.
The bees don’t ask. They know what I’ve become.

Decades pass. They still come for my honey.
They bring their coins, their hunger and their need,
Their children’s children, golden-haired and sunny.
I give them what they crave. I watch them feed.

I sell them what they came for—gold and thick,
The summer meadow simmered, bottled down.
I smile. They pay. The honey does the trick.
They carry home the darkness of my ground.

They do not know I’ve learned to love the sting,
The venom threading fire through all my blood.
They do not know what certain pollens bring
With clover, thyme, and winter’s patient mud.

I give them everything they asked me for.
She made me in her image, stung and still.
The hive crowned me its queen of keeping score.
The sweetest things are always slow to kill.