Take Heart: A Conversation in Poetry: About Bees is What I Say Aloud When You Ask What I'm Thinking

Edited and introduced by Wesley McNair, Maine Poet Laureate

Here’s a poem for June by Kimberly Cloutier Green of Kittery. Inspired by bees that are “besotted” by apple nectar, the poem describes a lover’s intoxication.

About Bees is What I Say Aloud When You Ask What I’m Thinking by Kimberly Cloutier Green

Watching bees plunge into sunlit blossoms
and stagger back besotted
   by the apple nectar on their tongues,
I feel their hunger as mine—

          the longing to linger awhile
as though winged,
   looped in this daze of pink light, confusing
morning for a flower,
   all my drowsy preparations
of our toast and tea
   a slow, zigzagging industry,

          then sharing my stores
of gathered sweetness with you
   in a rapture of emptying,
each turn I make in my dance
   timed for the signal flashes of gold
dust on my feet on my hands on your face.

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Take Heart: A Conversation in Poetry is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. Poem copyright © 2013 Kimberly Cloutier Green. Reprinted from The Next Hunger, Bauhan Publishing, 2013, by permission of Kimberly Cloutier Green. Questions about submitting to Take Heart may be directed to Gibson Fay-LeBlanc, Special Consultant to the Maine Poet Laureate, at mainepoetlaureate@gmail.com or 207-228-8263. Take Heart: Poems from Maine, an anthology collecting the first two years of this column, is now available from Down East Books.