The Swarm In Winter

"the white bees are swarming" I read in someone's poem once about the snow

I wish I could remember whose it was or perhaps in an English translation of

Hans Andersen's 'The Snow Queen" whosever it was it was rich in allusion

it gave back so many things I felt in that season of winter prolonged such a circuitous marvel of engineering,

music surely that would be the image for that Kingdom and the stinging nettle weather and how we were wronged.

and where the ice grew more thickly where we could no longer measure it at the poles,

enduring only another white twilight white night chain of our lack of being any longer

in the bright world the warm world or even just happy

amid the sugar snow, the sweet

maple reductions, left with only compunction

and thus, the sound of everything had become

the white bee swarm of the snow making it all indistinguishable for a long, long while, you know, or you don't know or you will forget

though it hasn't happened yet

both hill and fern and the immovable waters.

we could not have settled into that cold. it is always stinging but it became hard to leave

the puzzles behind simple to become entrapped in figuring out to perfection

what really should not matter to us at all. under the thrall of the white bees. the White Queen the numbed and numbered dominions intractable; measuring everything zeros and ones

the white bees swarm and the snows are stinging us repeatedly the summer of clover of cloves has died

each time we contemplate the weather outside and worship it as a god oh solstice solstice the murmuring drones on

no longer can it be called midsommer the heart is a husk that goes on beating while it is sleeting no longer will we

make flower chains and return to our mother with the violet and the honey colored ones

the heart is a blank mariner has set its frozen course in a mechanical diction, dictation with the buzzy buzz words

spurious meticulous nation reducing all music to a single drum

and cannot love and cannot remember the sun, the roses! Gerta cried the purple onions, or any one

because "the science has moved on" in stupified impervious gestures

the Queen of all law now

sweeping the data before her; dismissing

the wailing, the waning of the children. elegant. proving everything should be shall be

insensate, without mercy.

Corrected. surpassingly drained of life.

and all of us one rapt field of acquiescence

who have laid down forever, our diamond shields.

mary angela douglas 20 december 2020

1Mary Angela Douglas