Poetry by Willie Smith
In a binocular field,
thick as spines in a blackberry thicket,
the Beehive sparkles with stars.
This mere, to the naked eye, hazy smear
the Greeks dub The
The lone stars on either side stand for the donkeys
Dionysos and Silenus into
the cluster in Cancer’s Breast
other drama metastasizes.
Two
words shape-shifting through ever-birthing minds.
These very bees – suns six hundred lightyears off –
will come to tell, in mangled Greek or ancient English,
stories askew from how we alive tonight,
standing under the hive, understand the light.