Five Points, Vol. 15 No 1&2
Spring 2013From James Dickey, “I meant to write about the universal need for contact that runs through all sentient beings and will be served, even if it creates monsters. It’s too strong for everything.”
Sample Content
Melanie Rae Thon
Galaxies Beyond Violet
1.
Yes, it’s true, the bees are vanishing, not just dying, but disappearing, buzzing away from the hive at dawn and not returning.
Their bodies are perfect:
On the seventh day, God did not rest: God began to imagine the honeybee and the flower. Time blossomed into light, the infinite possibilities of perception. One hundred million years of thought, and even now the evolution of love continues.
Our strange sister!
Who but God can fathom: two compound eyes, each with sixty-nine hundred lenses, four filigree wings beating two hundred thirty times per second:
Behold the honeybee!
Thirteen millimeters long, ninety-nine milligrams:
I make myself in her image.
As she flies, foraging for nectar and pollen, the friction of wind through feathery hairs builds a static charge, her body electric. Above or below, the flower opens: infinite blue, worlds of yellow, a murmuration of white shimmering into thirteen thousand eight hundred lenses. She’s blind to red, but sees a universe we can’t know, galaxies beyond violet.
So lovingly she lands!
Pollen jumps into the hairs of her charges body. Hidden in the flower’s folds, she plunges the tube of her proboscis deep, flicks her long tongue, sips love’s holy nectar. She can drink herself drunk and buzz away dizzy. Each time she rises, her body glows, dusted with pollen. All day she moves, transferring life one flower to another, fertilizing ovaries that swell to ripened fruit and feed the world: five thousand blossoms in a day: a hundred and seventy-five thousand in her lifetime: forty days:
Until her wings wear thing, until her tattered body falls and fails.
She pollinates apples, pears, pecans, strawberries: avocadoes, almonds, squash, kiwis: oranges, peaches, soybeans, cherries: papaya, pepper, mango, coffee: blueberries, grapefruit, cantaloupe, broccoli: lemons, limes, clover, celery:
Behold the honeybee who makes your life possible.
She is the spark between: without her, they cease to be, and we soon shall follow.
Imagine pollinating your own blossoms, scrubbing anthers, gathering pollen, carrying your treasure home in tiny baskets, remembering to dry it for two days at precisely the right temperature, returning to your fields and orchards, lying on your belly in the dirt or climbing high to fertilize each flower. You carry a tiny duster made of bamboo and chicken feathers. Too much is too much. One light dip, one flick, one flutter: may you dwell in the open heart: clear your mind of all distraction.
Brother, as we lose our lives, we will love this world. Here is the path to peace, kneeling on the earth, bowing to the flower, surrendering our will blossom by blossom.