Foraging
The honey won’t make itself, and so to the fields heavy with flower
to pack pollen in the sacks of their legs
and load their stomachs with sweet nectar. Bees sustain
the hive by taking flight and swarm that way too:
a lone messenger, tremor, and soon the queen
is gone. Some will follow. Some will stay rooted
to the same honey-thick walls where a new queen
will be sent forth on her nuptial flight
like small force of nature—a breeze that parts
your hair or slides a scrap of paper through a crack in the floor.
She will find the hive again after mating, grow
too fat to fly, lay eggs for years, and never again
feel the sting of sun or ripple of wind off a drone’s back.
Instead, she births emissaries, little heralds of drought or storm
to clean her with saliva they feed on far away fields.
There are ways we taste the places we cannot see or touch,
ways to ingest industry that isn’t ours.
Drop the honey to your tongue. Taste this field.
Amanda Moore is a high school English teacher and lives by the beach in the Outer Sunset neighborhood of San Francisco with her husband and daughter. Her poetry and essays have appeared in journals and anthologies including ZZYZVA, Best New Poets, Cream City Review, The Baltimore Review, Tahoma Literary Review, and Mamas and Papas: On the Sublime and Heartbreaking Art of Parenting, and she is the recipient of writing awards from The Writing Salon, Brush Creek Arts Foundation, and The Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts. More about her work can be found at http://amandapmoore.com.