I miss Honey on the Table

This, as most of you know, was not my year for honey.  I miss my bees on my deck and I didn't realize how much I would miss their honey.  I am glad there are bees at the two community gardens and at Valerie's house, but May and June seem far away and honey is really missing from my table.

I have a few jars left from 2008 but I feel stingy with it and miss the generous feeling of many jars in the cupboard.

One of my new favorite poets, Mary Oliver, writes often about the bees.  Her "Honey at the Table" really speaks to me:

Honey at the Table


It fills you with the soft
essence of vanished flowers, it becomes 
a trickle sharp as a hair that you follow
from the honey pot over the table


and out the door and over the ground,
and all the while it thickens,


grows deeper and wilder, edged
with pine boughs and wet boulders,
pawprints of bobcat and bear, until


deep in the forest you
shuffle up some tree, you rip the bark


you float into and swallow the dripping combs,
bits of the tree, crushed bees - a taste
composed of everything lost, in which everything 
lost is found.


--Mary Oliver from American Primitive


She has written a number of poems including bees and I'll share more over time.