Poems by Sharon Pretti

Talking to Children after all the Bees are Gone

by Sharon Pretti

From Canary Summer 2024

Sharon lives on the border of the Pacific Ocean where she frequently walks and watches birds. Across the bay, she enjoys the Marin headlands and the beautiful and bountiful trails of Mt. Tamalpais.

How will we tell them about the air,
its hum fringing ceanothus in spring,

the sleeveless path we followed as if
apprenticed to every season we walked into?

When we quiet them and their faces
tilt like the moon towards us, how will we

convince them translucent = wing?
A photo? A drawing from memory of Apis mellifera?

How to make real the worker bee’s
waggle dance, the distance before lavender

is reached, its odor astir on the antennae?
Who’s to say our children won’t clamor

for a compound eye, 6500 facets to imbibe
the world from above, below, to the side?

Our daughters and sons demand the fantastic—
sticky pads at the end of each leg so window glass

can be climbed, the underside of a slide.
Their bodies believe in us,

small boned, able to collapse against our chests.
We unpucker a sock, glue stars

to their ceilings hoping to disguise
the holes we’ve left in the sky.

We’re practiced in the past tense—how pollen
was combed into the corbicula. Again,

they insist, not yet asleep, their eyelids
uncrusted, that story again.