The Bee Glade - A Visual Poem

The Bee Glade

2nd June

Enamoured with the flowers, I return the next day, entering 
the emerald silence, somnolent after traffic and street, taking 
an avenue dark with evergreen...

spills of lilac recalling my grandmother, saying, on our last walk together, 
'Pull down that branch, Maria, please, with the crook of my walking stick for me to smell.'

I hooked it down with her cane, grandma inhaling the sweet aroma, that one image 

of the two of us, the most memorable.

Further on, the gardeners are busy at work, a few of them. 
They seem to be planting out seedlings, knelt in the soil, as though 
they could be penitents at mass, but their Gods - the earth, the plants 
they grow from it, rain, sun and each other.

I wander on and reach a pool, pricked with water drops cascading 

like the high notes on a piano. 

It is a vast font, with a sea god at its heart and mermaids, and water 
tumbling from a conch.

I take pictures then of my reflection, Dali's cautionary-tale painting - 
The Metamorphosis of Naricissus, at the back of my mind, the flower 
erupting from the egg shaped stone, the fate of a man obsessed with himself.
It's like I have a gallery that travels with me inside my head.

I gaze, for seconds, at the distorted self-portraits, like nothing I have ever seen, 
some hidden-me mutant, dark and alone. 
Meanwhile, the water drops splash down that image, like crystal clear tears, 

beads broken off a rosary, 
water flicked from a font in a collective blessing, my reflection 
swallowing 
pills of light and element.

I make a film, an idea I had for a while, where words on paper float and rearrange, 
but the words I write out - HB on rough-torn quadrilaterals - 
CARPE DIEM UNTIL YOU DIE - are pale and illegible when later 
I view the recording, half submerged in the waves.

Never mind.
It was a little prayer said to the sky.

I turn from the pool, the mermaids frozen forever into their stone forms, 
and wander along beyond clusters of buttercups, empty deck-chairs in pairs, 
daisies like tiny white stitches in the grass... 

The deck chairs remind me of couples grown old,
seated beside one another for a very long time, growing old by the willow 
and the sycamore... 
but I will bear solitude if I must...

And the poppies astound me again with their effortless blaze.... 
And this time, cupped in a glade of apple red light is the plump honey bee, 
pollen covered, bonded with strips of gold... 
Then gone to the next poppy of this dazzling bee glade.

For ages I watch the winged creature mesmerised by the fluster
of silvery wings and whir of activity. 

***