The Fullness of Honey

In 2005,
I drove great grandmother
home from church
back to our family farm,
and we talked about rain—
the plants sure needed it—
but poor New Orleans,
the black sky,
the dancing trees.

My grandmother told me
of her childhood,
of woods that children watched
but did not enter,
of wolves who watched them back.

My grandmother told me
she watched those trees fall,
traded for Black Angus,
until the family farm
could not keep up with
commercial antibiotics.

Today trees fall there again
for a four-car garage
and the great American dream
stands on a great oak grave.

Tonight I watch the news,
cry foul that brown-skinned farmers
in the Amazon
do what white men did here
just generations ago—
do what white men forced
black-skinned farmers to do
here
just generations ago.

Just a generation ago
there were yellow bees
on the farm with the red dirt tracks.
Once I ran past their buzzing hive,
quick and afraid.
Now I fear
because I cannot hear them,
the glyphosate-induced patterns they draw,
erratic like a failing heart.

A generation ago
the monarch danced here
in a field sheltered by tall pines,
but come fall
she was mowed down with the hay.

Listen.
The fluttering sound of soft wings—
beating at the border.

Come. Build a milkweed bridge
between us.
Come. Love your neighbor.
Come. Proclaim peace.

Peace between us
must be offered by human hands.
The gods will not lift a finger
to save the cities built
on destroyed forest temples.

The temple is burning.
I see the faces of thousands in the fire.
Can you see their humanity?

Who is my enemy?
There is no enemy here.
I see myself.

I see myself
in the rearview mirror
the day that I drove
great grandmother home from church.
The sky was turning black,
the trees danced,
and she said she remembered
Hurricane Hazel in 1950,
and how just five years before
she'd heard the bells
ringing and ringing—
ringing for V-Day.

The bells are ringing—
fire! Fire!
We huddle in the basement
with a sky dissolved by chlorofluorocarbons,
our house full of smog and poison.
We cannot breathe.

The bells are ringing
so mournfully
for chestnut trees
and cuckoo birds.

But we cannot go underground
like our dead.

We cannot ride out the storm
beneath the earth.
Instead rise—
rise like saplings,
rise bursting from the ground.

Roar with the wind
for the bees and monarchs,
for peace,
with the fullness of honey.