NaPoWriMo April 2014

Here is a poem about an accident in my garden, two years ago now, which I remember whenever I see the lavender bushes and rosemary beginning to flower. I feel a little sad and guilty - though it was an accident. I've been reading about Emily Dickinson, the 19th century American poet who was very fond of her garden and wrote about bees, too. Emily Dickinson's poems were often deceptively simple in language and her punctuation was surprising. My poem is simple in a much less subtle way.....  

Thursday 
17th April

Garden

We found a bees’ nest here
under that Lavender bush
beside the flagstone path.

We’d known the nest was somewhere near
because we saw workers with laden legs
staggering to fly up from the flowers.

When the lawnmower ploughed
into the hidden sandy mound
we saw the white larvae

and the panicking dying bees
carrying brown eggs like beads
struggling to rebuild.


© Janice Windle