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Mama Mada
We are the Bees of the Invisible
by Anja Ko nig
says Rilke, of poets (I think). I thought I could never
be a bee: all that peer pressure, the hum
and hustle of the hive. Who can relax
when the next bee is doing her urgent dance?
But the bees of the invisible live wild,
solitary lives – in bee hotels in botanical gardens,
in hollow reeds, in holes in dry bricks,
a kind of Manhattan at the edge of a wood.
Each singular bee in her cell makes
honey, so transparent that it looks like nothing.
But a hungry tongue can just detect its mix
of tastes, its texture, tough and sweet, like love.
The People We Meet In Dreams by Mirand a Yate s
The man from the town centre post office bangs your door
in a ruby cape mouthing the whereabouts of The Prowler,
and then is gone, down to the shudder of the village stream,
where they are all scattered on the brink of a public hanging.
Not that you are you and he is him exactly, but there’s
always the hard seed of a person through which we recognise them.
That, for example, is absolutely how your mother would shout:
“The steeple is burning! Take your wives and tie them to the chairs!”
and that is quite the way she would run la-di-da down Coal Pitt Lane.
We brush them with our eyelashes as they rear into the half-dark
before we have the chance to follow the trail of crumbs
that might bring us winding back to roads taken and taken and taken.
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