Introducing a new series of poems by Julian Matthews. Julian is a writer and Pushcart-nominated poet published in The American Journal of Poetry, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, Borderless Journal, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Dream Catcher Magazine, Live Encounters Magazine, Lothlorien Poetry Journal and The New Verse News, among others. He is a mixed-race minority from Malaysia and lived in Ipoh for seven years. Currently based in Petaling Jaya, he is a media trainer and consultant for senior management of multinationals on Effective Media Relations, Social Media and Crisis Communications. He was formerly a journalist with The Star and Nikkei Business Publications Inc
Link: https://linktr.ee/julianmatthews
By Julian Matthews
At sunrise, in our garden, the shrubbery is speckled with bejewelled dew,
flowers like hungry beaks open to greet mother sun and I’m pottering about
with a trowel, when the sounds of a bee buzzing in and out of the wild pink
and purple hyacinths, growing at the untrimmed hedge, catches my post-coffee
attention.
Mr Google says a single bee produces one 12th of a teaspoon of honey
in its entire short lifetime. That’s a dozen hardworking foragers which sacrificed
their lives for a single teaspoon that went into my cereal this morning.
A New Scientist story says the average honeybee lives only 18 days
these days, down from 34 days, almost a 50% fall over the past five decades.
Another article speculates how bees may go extinct by 2050.
I see the bee before me has not read the science, nor does she care.
Busy is as busy does. Tiny pollen sticks to her head, torso, legs
like waxy beads as she flits away. She’ll visit an average of a thousand
flowers today alone, pollinating thousands more in those last days of her life—
I go over your excuses now, your rebuffs, your last replies: “I’m busy!”
went the usual refrain, or “Maybe, next week,” until all the maybes evaporated
into the ether, the messaging stopped, and the screen went dark forever.
I reminisce in this beautiful garden we grew, with the heat rising,
the bees now disappearing from view, these emptied flowers, and everything
I remember of you, all the foraged memories falling off leaves like the last drips
of dew, as I turn towards our living hive, its dead queen,
and the sting of another ugly cry.
First published in literary magazine Lit Shark, Issue 8, based in Europe.
