When my daughter drizzles gold
on her breakfast toast, I remind her
she’s seen the bee men in our tree,
casting smoke like a spell until
the swarm thrums itself to sleep.
She’s seen them wipe the air clean
with smoke, the way a hand smudges
chalk from a slate, erasing danger
written there, as if smoke revises
the story of the air until each page
reads never fear, never fear. Honey
is in the hive, forbidden lantern
lit on the inside, where it must be dark,
where it must always be. Honey
is sweetness and fear. I think
the bees have learned to embroider,
to stitch the sky with warnings
untouched by smoke. Buzzing
is the sound of bees perforating the air,
as if pulling thread through over
and over, though the thread too is air.
Maggie Smith is the author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful (Atria, 2023); Goldenrod (Atria, 2021); Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change (Atria, 2020); Good Bones (Tupelo, 2017), named one of the Best Five Poetry Books of 2017 by the Washington Post and winner of the 2018 Independent Publisher Book Awards Gold Medal in Poetry; The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison (Tupelo, 2015), winner of the 2012 Dorset Prize and the 2016 Independent Publisher Book Awards Gold Medal in Poetry; and Lamp of the Body (Red Hen, 2005), winner of the 2003 Benjamin Saltman Award. A 2011 recipient of a Creative Writing Fellowship from the NEA, Smith has also received six Individual Excellence Awards from the Ohio Arts Council, two Academy of American Poets Prizes, a Pushcart Prize, and fellowships from the Sustainable Arts Foundation and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.