About their Bee

For Professor and Mrs Alice Laurence

The lilies in the hall
trumpeted their presence,
exuding procreation
with a scent as heady as
a pheromone. Gaudy in
their summer things, they
remind me of a woman
carefree and dangerous.

A bee was found in the
keyhole, in a passion of
desperation and despair.
From the huge world
but there, it had found
that tiny target, enflamed by
the female in the flower.
Let go, it flew away, but

back it came, and was
there again, on your return
later in the day. Wiser now,
it scuttled away, seething,
while I struggle for words
to preserve it forever,
embalmed and bejewelled
deep in an amber forest.

(Published in Acumen, May 2006)