The Railway Street Bee-keeper

Placing the bee-hive carefully in the car, the old man said
he should stay for dinner, and together they spooned up
plates of mash puddled with butter and gravy. Then he drove
home, ten miles across the peninsula with the windows
shut tight, the car soaked with heat, and honey bees
crawling like slow raindrops across the windscreen.

He settled the hive at the top of the long thin garden
and in the morning watched sun-wakened bees
fly from street to low round hills. In the evenings
his bees returned to the notes of piccolos and flutes
from the Orange Hall next door, and eight times a day
the hive shook at the slowing of the Belfast train.

Sacrificing rags he breathed skeins of smoke into the hive
like offerings. The honey he took was the sweetest he'd tasted
but all that summer he throbbed with stings. One, dead centre
between his eyes, changed the shape of his face for a week.
Sting by sting he came to believe that anything he found
as sweet in life, would likely wound him, perhaps fatally.

Ruth Thompson