Renewal & Rebirth
favim.com/image/166787/ Kaiserr
What a long year this has been...
This dark winter, with only one option- to reflect.
On choices made, choices lost
garden grown and gone to fallow
one's reflection in the lonely glass
sourdough in the jar, a life to feed.
Solitude a song of it's own.
The quiet melody of shifting perspectives.
My bees left this year
fleeing the poison of urban wildfires.
They slipped away when the smoke was thick
while the summer blossoms too felt the burning dust
and my chickens lost their feathers and will to lay.
I allowed this loss to settle like ashes
as the world around me cycled from
heat and dense air into rain and clean wind
Nothing was left in the comb
not honey, nor even a bit of brood
and it dawned on me,
perhaps they left and flew beyond the fumes?
Perhaps their go-bag was better prepared than mine?
Me with an empty tank, a selection of too many shoes
and no way to pack my pond fish
as the fires reflected against the burning sky and
licked along the roadside, crazy and raging.
After this winter came and cooly settled my mind
I seemed to re-member that
the bees knew and taught
how to sing despite pandemic
dance in blossoms under dark skies
find the clean air, just beyond
and believe in renewal.
Did they cluster together, starting with full honey stomachs,
packed with memories, and stories of a well-grown garden?
Did they manage to fit into a forgotten far-flung crevice and peer into the next day's dawn?
Did they, like borderless refugees, flee to a safe haven,
just beyond the arson of humanity? Somehow, eternally focused on renewal?
Will they return to their abandoned home, quietly perched there, with the door left ajar?
The light is returning bit by bit.
I can sense it.
My chickens beginning to capture a bit of it in their sunny yolks
as they gift warm eggs under fresh fluff and loud, proud pronouncements.
I can sense it off the green of the winter hummingbirds flickering wings,
and the tenth baby goldfish in the cold pond, somehow growing.
I can feel it finding forgotten potatoes in the churning soil in the garden,
where I too begin to re-plant, this time for tomorrow.
A tomorrow I am beginning to believe in.
Last night the bees sang deep into my Dreamtime,
into that place in my mind that never left me.
Into the space of a memory more real than the empty hive in the garden.
The sound of creation, they left there, a physical script.
Were I a musician I would play it on the piano, or conduct a symphony to describe it.
Instead, with clumsy words I can offer, a feeble attempt to try to remind us
That tomorrow takes fortitude, commitment.
And renewal will emerge from that void pregnant with possibilities.
Even the tender seedling must pierce darkness, after breaking open the hard kernel that held it.
So too will we make it through these times, to see the spring again.
The bees will return
with that promise of fortitude,
the song of the cyclical sun,
the commitment of the garden,
and the love of hive and home.
Hang in there.
Winter is nearly over.
The bees told me in my winter dream last night.
Springtime will soon be here.
Love, Laura Bee
