Honeybee Read online

  Naomi Shihab Nye

  Honeybee

  Poems & Short Prose

  In memory of Aziz Shihab

  1927-2007

  our beloved father

  and

  Elizabeth Nye Sorrell

  1909-2007

  She loved poetry all of her days.

  “In place of going to heaven at last,

  I’ve been going there all along.”

  Let the bees go honey-hunting

  with yellow blur of wings

  in the dome of my head,

  in the rumbling, singing arch of my skull.

  — Carl Sandburg

  From “In Tall Grass”

  Last night I dreamed—blessed illusion—

  that I had a beehive here

  in my heart

  and that the golden bees were making

  white combs and sweet honey

  from my old failures.

  — Antonio Machado

  Translated by Robert Bly

  Contents

  Epigraph

  Honeybee

  Introduction

  Your Buddy Is Typing

  Someone You Will Not Meet

  A Stone So Big You Could Live in It

  Museum

  For My Desk

  Communication Skills

  The United States Is Not the World

  Taverne du Passage

  Wee Path

  Password

  The Frogs Did Not Forget

  Missing It

  The Crickets Welcome Me to Japan

  Ted Kooser Is My President

  How We Talk About It

  Culture of Life

  Missing Thomas Jefferson

  Don’t Say

  Running Egret

  Lion Park

  The Little Bun of Hours

  Pollen

  Honeybees Drinking

  Weird Hurt

  We Are the People

  Help with Your Homework

  Busy Bee Takes a Break

  Bees Were Better

  Invisible

  Girls, Girls

  What Happened to the Air

  Slump

  Deputies Raid Bexar Cockfight

  Accuracy

  This Is Not a Dog Urinal

  Argument

  There Was No Wind

  Companions

  For a Hermit

  Letters My Prez Is Not Sending

  Broken

  The Cost

  Friendly Postal Clerk, Saturday Morning

  While You Were Out

  Driving to Abilene in the Pouring Rain

  Cinnamon Twist

  Sunday

  We Are Not Nothing

  Our Best Selves

  The Dirtiest 4-Letter Word

  RSVP

  Boathouse

  The Problem of Muchness

  How Do I Know When a Poem is Finished?

  Excuse Me But

  Bears

  Pacify

  To One Now Grown

  Watch Your Language

  Cat Plate

  Click

  Hibernate

  My President Went

  Texas Swing Low

  From an Island

  The White Cat

  Ducks in Couples

  Campaigning Door to Door

  Parents of Murdered Palestinian Boy Donate His Organs to Israelis

  Before I Read The Kite Runner

  The First Time I Was Old

  Useless

  Jonathan’s Kiwi Cake

  Consolation

  For Rudolf Staffel

  Hot Stone Massage

  Regular Days

  Last Day of School

  Young Drummer Leaving Alamo Music Company

  The Room in Which We Are Every Age at Once

  Gate A-4

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  HONEYBEE

  Dipping into the flower zone

  Honey stomach plump with nectar

  Soaking up directions

  Finding our ways in the dark

  Fat little pollen baskets

  Plumping our legs

  You had no idea, did you?

  You kept talking about

  That wheelbarrow

  And chicken

  Round dance

  Waggle dance

  Only 5 species of honeybee

  Among 20,000 different bee species

  Out there in the far field

  Something has changed but

  You don’t know what it is yet

  And everything depends

  On us

  Introduction

  One of my favorite classes in college was a linguistics course called “The Nature of Language,” in which students studied the language of animals. A few students not in the class made fun of us, mooing when they saw our notebooks. I selected bees as my focus for the semester, and our wonderful professor, Dr. Bates Hoffer, said this was a good choice, since bees are fabulous communicators. Bees can tell each other where the good flowers are—how far away, which direction to fly. They do jazzy dances. They can find their ways back to their own hives even if you try to block or trick them. Bees have memory and specific on-the-job task assignments and 900,000-neuron brains. I buzzed about the campus for a happy semester, researching in farm journals and encyclopedias, writing strange, dramatic papers, hoping to be stung.

  What I do not recall studying was the growing industry of migratory beekeeping, in which beekeepers transport their hives long distances for pollination purposes. Maybe it wasn’t happening much yet. The huge almond crop in California, for example, has in recent years been highly dependent on hired bees. You now can read about industrious beekeepers who travel (it’s not easy) the interstates with hundreds of hives in giant trucks. Good thing those bees can communicate. Maybe they’re saying, “Where are we now? When’s my time off?”

  I also don’t recall learning much about bee problems, though bees certainly had experienced struggles in their communities already and could be victimized by everything from funguses to viruses to mites.

  During the spring of 2007, bee woes made continual headline news in the United States. Many reports said at least one third of the honeybees in the United States had mysteriously vanished. A grieving South Texas beekeeper was shown slumping sadly in his field of empty hives. Florida and Oklahoma recorded their sorrows. Anderson Cooper did a late-night special on CNN. Honey prices rose. There was lots of speculation about what was happening to bees, but no single answer or remedy.

  I collected theories. Were pesticides, or nasty varroa mites, which had swept the bee nation, most responsible? Could it be changing weather conditions or cell phone beams? Obviously the current atmosphere sizzles with more electronic signals than any world of the past…I was ready to pitch my cell phone out. Something called “colony collapse disorder” was often cited as a possibility. Seemed like a parallel for human beings in times of war. War is no blossom.

  The ongoing Bee Tragedy Stories remain inconclusive. I called Dr. Hoffer after decades and he agreed it’s a troubling topic. Some people say “no big deal”—this fits into the cyclic pattern of nature—other insects or species of bees will pollinate where the honeybees leave off. But Dr. May Berenbaum, head of the department of entomology at the University of Illinois, says, “Though economists differ in calculating the exact dollar value of honeybee pollination, virtually all estimates (of losses to crops, etc.) range in the billions of dollars.” That can’t be good.

  So, I’ve been obsessed. This is what happens in life. Something takes over your mind for a while and you see other things through a new filter, in a changed light. I call my friends “honeybee” now,
which I don’t recall doing before. If I see a lone bee hovering in a flower, I wish it well.

  As for the “busy bee” thing, the word “busy” fell out of my vocabulary more than ten years ago. I haven’t missed it at all. “Busy” is not a word that helps us. It just makes us feel worse as we are doing all we have to do.

  Anyway, why are we rushing around so much? The common phrase “I can’t wait” has always troubled me. Does it mean you want your life to pass more swiftly? This or that future moment will surely be better than the current moment, right? The moment we are living in may be lovely, but if we “can’t wait” for some other time, do we miss it? We are honeybees in our own lives. But we forget.

  Antonio Machado, the brilliant poet from Spain, dreamed a beehive in his heart could turn even flaws into something tasty. This interests me a lot. One thing becoming another, in the tradition of alchemy…

  We are trained to work for success, but failures, mistakes, or disasters may lead us in intriguing new directions. As a young man, Rudolf Staffel forgot to sign up early for a painting course in Mexico and was stuck taking the pottery course. His whole life swerved. He became one of the great ceramic artists of the twentieth century.

  Tim Duncan, the star of the San Antonio Spurs basketball team, was a swimmer when he was growing up. He practiced all the time. But a hurricane devastated the pool on his home island of St. Croix. It wasn’t his own failure but the pool’s demise which helped lead him to huge success in a different sport.

  Are the honeybees cooking something up behind the scenes? How many writers or artists have said they stumbled into their favorite works when something else they were trying to create didn’t succeed?

  In Holyoke, Massachusetts, a vintage restaurant called Nick’s Nest has been serving hot dogs, baked beans, potato salad, and popcorn since 1921. The slogan of the restaurant is “The Nest of Delicious.” When my friend and I saw it one day, as we sped by in the rain on our way to eat in another town, I shouted, “Stop! I have to see that place! Look, it’s totally old-fashioned!”

  She said, “I thought we wanted Indian food.”

  We stared at the menu on the wall. My friend said, “See, they serve mostly hot dogs and you’re a vegetarian…. I don’t see any tofu pups on the menu.” She was right. There was no entrée to suit me. We were in a vegetable curry mood. But my eyes drank in the countertop, the funny signs, the little booths with old jukeboxes still attached to the tables, and I knew, even though we didn’t eat there, I would remember Nick’s Nest forever. (Luckily another friend has now sent me a Nick’s Nest T-shirt, so I can belong to it in spirit anyway.) Drinking it in. That’s when we really live. Dipping and diving down into the nectar of scenes. Tasting, savoring, collecting sweetness…if you’re in Holyoke, would you please go eat there for me?

  My niece in Australia told me that the students in her university class were required to read the blog of an Iraqi citizen and write about it before they could graduate. She chose a girl who is now fifteen writing under the pseudonym Sunshine. I began reading Sunshine’s blog too. I love the way she writes about details of her life—her friends, the books she is reading, her activities and memories. Life is so difficult since the war started, but still she ends her entries with lines like, “Try not to lose hope.” She wishes she could live the way kids in other countries live, without so much constant violence surrounding them. Sunshine has become my personal hero, drinking deeply out of the moments she is given, even when she wishes they were different moments. So much is passing so fast….

  My husband’s cousin’s husband, a man named Dee, who lives in Houston, recently sent out an e-mail survey asking people where and when was the last time they had seen a lightning bug. He remembered sitting on his Texas front porch as a boy, seeing hundreds of lightning bugs blinking around him. I had wondered about the lost lightning bugs over the years myself, and blamed their disappearance on pesticides. Many young people in the United States have never seen one and don’t know what they do. (Why aren’t the mosquitoes disappearing, by the way? Are they so much heartier than lightning bugs and honeybees?)

  Dee’s correspondents in far-flung little towns like Rosebud and Rockdale, Texas, replied that they were lucky still to have lightning bugs, but people in cities were all missing them. They remembered droves and crowds of them, the great American sport of capturing lightning bugs in jars with holes punctured in the lids and letting them go again. I wrote that the first time our son saw a lightning bug, when he was about six, in the Texas hill country, he insisted it was carrying a small kerosene lantern.

  Here’s a hope that we don’t lose any more of the small things that blink in our darkness. Albert Einstein allegedly said, “If all the honeybees disappear, human beings have four years left on earth.” We’d better increase our levels of attention.

  Facts about insects and animals feel refreshing these days, when human beings are deeply in need of simple words like “kindness” and “communicate” and “bridge.” Turtle organs do not deteriorate as a turtle ages. A shrimp’s heart is in its head. Our cat just said, “Outside” and meant it, as a squirrel, swinging upside down from the bird feeder beyond the window, announced he is really a bird in disguise.

  Your Buddy Is Typing

  Your buddy in the early hours. Your buddy with the scratchy throat who didn’t sleep well. On the other side of the earth he is rising, making a single cup of coffee, sitting down at a small wooden table. Your buddy who hasn’t shaved in weeks. Your buddy in Nuevo Laredo missing the old days the easy crossings of borders the wanderings in streets without fear. Your buddy who doesn’t want to see any bullets is typing a letter he will not sign. Your buddy with the aching wrist. Your buddy with high hopes watching sun come up over calm water thinking, we’ll make it, maybe. Your buddy who sends 17 letters in 14 days. A surge of random observations but nothing is random. No one alone. The bold buddy and the shy one with a closet of stacked pages. The young buddy whose grandfather the great writer has been hiding for years. Your buddy in Japan who wishes your heart to feel like a primrose. Your buddy in Glasgow eating a radish as he types in golden light. Your buddy in a head scarf begging for sense. Your buddy in a sari who bosses the men. Your buddy who types with three fingers like you do. Your buddy in Australia your weary buddy in the airport lounge your buddy in the village library your buddy in the wireless hotel room where even the rod under the clothes lights up your buddy on the brink your buddy who was reminded what words could do after he swore they could do nothing anymore your buddy in Bethlehem who wonders if anyone listens your buddy who is feeling weak your buddy who tells what is really going on behind the scenes your buddy who refuses to back down your lost buddy who won’t speak to you punishing you for reasons unknown even she must be typing to someone else by now, trust in this as you say good-bye give it up, typing will help you get through it no matter where you are when the restaurants close and the little shops you loved bolt their doors for the last time and the artist you wish you’d known better dies suddenly, you grip the memory of minor messages sent back and forth only months ago. Who else should you be typing to right now? Who else is on the way out? All of us. Everyone typing in the late and early in the far reaches in the remote unknowns in the heart of the diagnosis near the fishing huts with CATCH OF THE DAY signs the names of fish scrawled on blackboards by the whispering sea.

  Someone You Will Not Meet

  Rolls her socks into balls,

  lines them in a shoebox.

  Sharpens a yellow pencil

  carefully checking the point.

  There used to be plenty of pencils.

  Stares into a mirror thinking fat nose, fat nose.

  Pins a green bow to her head,

  plucks it off again.

  Worries about loud noises.

  Wraps presents in the same crumpled paper

  over and over again for members

  of her own family.

  Gives her brother an orange because

  h
e likes them more than she does.

  He complains, I am sick of this life.

  She fusses at him, Don’t say that.

  Gives her mother a handwritten booklet

  made of folded papers called

  One Apartment.

  The people she loves most are in it.

  The uncles who come and go are in it.

  Lucky ducks.

  They are afraid every time they go

  but they brave it.

  A few cats and plants and rugs are in it,