The Bees Gave The Farmer Poisoned Honey

The Bees Gave The Farmer Poisoned Honey

The farmer trusted what the hives returned,

Golden and thick with summer in its weight.

He tasted sun and clover on his tongue,

And called it good, and sealed it up as faith.

He never asked where every blossom grew,

What fields were treated, what the rain had learned.

The bees went where the flowers were allowed,

They gathered all that shone, and all that burned.

The honey kept its colour, kept its glow,

No bitterness to warn the careful mouth.

It poured like promise over bread and hands,

Sweet as the stories told from north to south.

The sickness came in quiet, ordinary ways,

A slowing step, a doubt behind the eyes.

He blamed the weather, blamed the turning year,

He never blamed the gift he trusted twice.

The bees had only done what bees must do,

They worked the world exactly as it stood.

They took from poisoned fields and blooming lies,

And made it taste like something pure and good.

The land remembers everything we spread,

The flowers learn it, quietly, by root.

And honey tells the truth we taught the bees,

No sweeter than the ground that feeds the fruit.

The ground was poisoned by human sprays,

The bees lived on, they always do.

And humans were erased not by the sting,

But by the carelessness they never named.