The Hive’s Heart
At the heart of the hive
is a kitchen warmly lit in midwinter.
There’s a voice describing gold and yellow,
their small but many differences.
At the heart of the hive
is a vase containing buttercups.
There’s an altar and a candle,
offerings to the god of suns.
Unearthly music can be heard,
an allurement sending bees into madness,
those clever carpenters and wheelwrights,
those busy emissaries with love on their lips.
How brief are their lives, how sweet their desperation.
Burning Juniper
Circa whenever and awhile.
The year zero in the month of never,
you and I on a five-year plan,
up to our chins in slow motions and quicksand,
good witches burning juniper,
warding off evil, summoning sprites to act our bidding,
deliverance almost a moment from here,
our hopes and wishes a shimmering mirage
in the desert of the ordinary.
It’s when o’clock in the fare-thee-well,
I in my poetic raptures and fugue,
you in your primordial rainforest,
flowers garlanding your hair, a glass raised
to sun and solstice.
Who I would wed every day for a year.
Infinite love. Eternal honeymoon.
The one night a long night.
Love purring like a well-fed kitten.
Made breathless with affections.
Bruce McRae
Bruce McRae, a Canadian musician, is a multiple Pushcart nominee with poems published in hundreds of magazines such as Poetry, Rattle and the North American Review. His books include The So-Called Sonnets (Silenced Press); An Unbecoming Fit Of Frenzy (Cawing Crow Press), Like As If (Pski’s Porch), and Hearsay (The Poet’s Haven).
