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It is said there are 20,000 species of bees, a genus 50 million years old, but in the fertile imagination of the world's poets, there is no beginning or end to the bee buzz. Virgil wrote of bees, as did Rumi, Shakespeare, Burns, Coleridge, Emerson, Mandelstam, Neruda, Whitman – a lyrical hum heard well into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in poems by Yeats, Lawrence, Plath, Mary Oliver, Carol Ann Duffy, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Sherman Alexie, among many others.
The title of If Bees are Few is from Emily Dickinson: To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee, / One clover, and a bee, / And revery. / The revery alone will do / If bees are few. Her conclusion resonates with a terrible poignancy today, as bees are indeed becoming few – hives collapsing, wild species disappearing. Amid this crisis, the poems collected here speak with a quiet urgency of a world lost if bees were to fall silent.
If anyone can save the bees, it is entomologist Dr. Marla Spivak and the hive of bee scientists and beekeepers at the Bee Lab at the University of Minnesota. A portion of the proceeds from this anthology will be donated to support research at the Bee Lab.
Foreword
Bill McKibben
Introduction
James P. Lenfestey
If Bees Are Few
Sherman Alexie
In the Matter of Human v. Bee
Maureen Ash
Swarm
Thorsten Bacon
On Bees
Aliki Barnstone
Alas
Willis Barnstone
Eleven Tiny Commandments
John Barr
First Light
Tree Bernstein
A/B/C Scenarios
Barry Blumenfeld
Boy with Honeybee Hair
Robert Bly
Words Rising
Sean Borodale
24th May: Collecting the Bees
6th September: Wild Comb Notes
10th February: Queen
Karina Borowicz
Medicine
Ruins
David Bottoms
Cemetery Wings
Jill Breckenridge
Honey
Fleda Brown
Bees
Robert Burns
“Of A’ the Airts the Wind Can Blaw”
John Burnside
Melissographia
John Caddy
Two New World Bees
Carpenter Bee
Leaf Cutter Bee
Jared Carter
Landing the Bees
Sharon Chmielarz
Bees
Lucille Clifton
earth
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Inscription for a Fountain on a Heath
Lorna Crozier
Angel of Bees
Annie Deppe
The Sacrament of the Bees
Emily Dickinson
With Flowers
The bee is not afraid of me
Possession
Two Worlds
The Bee
Could I but ride indefinite
The pedigree of honey
To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee
Josephine Dickinson
B?
Carol Ann Duffy
Bees
Ariel
Virgil’s Bees
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Humble-Bee
Heid E. Erdrich
Intimate Detail
Stung
Earl of Essex (Robert Devereaux)
The Buzzeinge Bee’s Complaynt
John Evans
The Bees
Diane Fahey
Bees
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Alienation: Two Bees?
Nick Flynn
Hive
Workers (attendants)
Blind Huber (iii)
Queen
Stuart Friebert
Supersedure
Ross Gay
Ode to the Beekeeper
Eamon Grennan
Up Against It
Barbara Hamby
The Language of Bees
Tom Hennen
Outside Work
Jim Heynen
The Man Who Talked to His Bees
Selima Hill
Elegy for the Bee-God
Brenda Hillman
In Summer, Everything Is Something’s Twin
Jane Hirshfield
Bees
Kevin Holden
Bees
Kobayashi Issa
Haiku
Helen Hunt Jackson
My Bees: An Allegory
Naomi Jackson
Prairie Bees
George Johnston
Ecstatic
Susan Deborah King
Prayer
Rudyard Kipling
The Bee-Boy’s Song
D. H. Lawrence
Flapper
David Lee
On Finding a Drone Bee and a Painted Lady Butterfly in the Same Claret Cup of Cactus Blossom
James P. Lenfestey
Honey
Blaming the Bee
Nathaniel “Max” Lenfestey
Beard of Bees
Her Sting
Diane Lockward
Invective against the Bumblebee
Antonio Machado
Song
Proverbs and Songs
Last Night, As I Lay Sleeping
Bruce MacKinnon
The Bees
Osip Mandelstam
The Necklace
Thomas McCarthy
Foraging Honey-Bees
Paula Meehan
The January Bee
Robert Morgan
Bees Awater
Honey
Moving the Bees
Lisel Mueller
Life of a Queen
Amy Nash
Not Just a Question of Fertility
Pablo Neruda
Ode to the Bee
Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Bee Wolf
Joan Nicholson
Antics of Bees
Naomi Shihab Nye
Honeybee
Bees Were Better
Pollen
Mary Oliver
Happiness
Honey at the Table
Joe Paddock
A Sort of Honey
Linda Pastan
The Death of the Bee
Sylvia Plath
The Bee Meeting
Stings
Lia Purpura
Bee
Jeri Reilly
Honey
James Silas Rogers
Bumblebee in the Basement
Pattiann Rogers
Service with Benediction
Paul B. Roth
Illusory
Rumi
When Grapes Turn to Wine
Jay Salter
Bee Hum
Night Hum
Non-Colonizing Native Bees
Robert Samarotto
Happy Hour at the Prickly Pear Saloon
Fiona Sampson
Winter Bees
William Shakespeare
Ariel’s Song
Jo Shapcott
I Tell the Bees
The Threshold
The Hive
Going About with the Bees
CCD
The Sting
Su Smallen
Buddha, Lily
Thomas R. Smith
The Queen in Winter
Ground Bees
Bee-Catching
Kim Stafford
Nuptial Flight
William Stafford
A Memorial: Son Bret
Pauline Stainer
The Honeycomb
Anne Stevenson
The Miracle of the Bees and the Foxgloves
Joyce Sutphen
Straight out of View
Barton Sutter
The Visitor
Haiku
May Swenson
A Couple
Mary Szybist
Entrances and Exits
Alfred Lord Tennyson
Come Down, O Maid
Maurice Thompson
Wild Honey
Jeanie Tomasko
Sweetness
Watching Bees
Jean Valentine
Bees
Virgil
The Nature and Qualities of Bees
Ellen Bryant Voigt
The Farmer
G. C. Waldrep
Their Faces Shall Be As Flames
Michael Walsh
Abandoned House with Vagrant Bees
Connie Wanek
Pollen
J. P. White
The Macadamia Nut Bees
Walt Whitman
from Spontaneous Me
John Greenleaf Whittier
Telling the Bees
Nancy Willard
Bees Swarming
The Poet Enters the Sleep of the Bees
Morgan Grayce Willow
One Clover, and a Bee
Eleanor Rand Wilner
The Girl with Bees in Her Hair
James Wright
The First Days
William Butler Yeats
The Lake Isle of Innisfree
from Meditations in Time of Civil War
Timothy Young
The Bee and the Mosquito
Afterword
Marla Spivak
Contributors
Permission Credits
James P. Lenfestey is a former editorial writer for the Minneapolis Star Tribune, where he won several Page One Awards for excellence. He has published a collection of personal essays, five collections of poems, the poetry anthology Low Down and Coming On: A Feast of Delicious and Dangerous Poems about Pigs, and coedited Robert Bly in This World, also from Minnesota. His memoir with prose and poems, Seeking the Cave: A Pilgrimage to Cold Mountain, Milkweed Editions, was a finalist for the 2014 Minnesota Book Award.
Bill McKibben is an author and environmentalist who was awarded the Right Livelihood Award, sometimes called the “alternative Nobel”, in 2014.
Marla Spivak is an entomologist and Distinguished McKnight University Professor at the University of Minnesota. In 2010 she was awarded a grant from the MacArthur Foundation for her pioneering research on honeybees. She heads the University’s Bee Lab.
