The Bees Have Not Yet Left Us
       

With a click, morning news pours heavy into the bedroom,
embedding itself with anchors' voices too syncopated and smooth
for the tangled math of troop buildups, the surge of death tolls
tallied daily now. Forgive me, distant wars and local heroes,
but I cannot listen. I can only sneak down to the boardwalk
and pick unlikely hyacinths on fire in rising light, can only
place them lance-like in last night's water glass as if this
one act could save a life or erase the reports of whole colonies
of bees lost on the wrong roads between our phone signals.
If apocalypse ever shows up, let us then eat only ashen bread
and bone-dry tubers. For now, I refuse to let another
second tick by, wasted, while he is waiting for me at the table
with dishes of fresh blueberries swaddled in cream.
I turn off the TV, throw open every window so we can taste
the faintly salted breeze filtering in from Humboldt Bay
and trembling the violet petals of these hyacinths I am now
holding out to him, until their pollen scatters violently
golden before us, this dust and air we are somehow
still breathing together.

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Copyright © 2012 James Crews All rights reserved
from The Book of What Stays
University of Nebraska Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission