Mary Oliver, poet and naturalist, has died

Mary Oliver loved nature and wrote about many parts of it. I've mentioned her poems about bees before, but since she died on January 17, 2019, last week, I want to note here about her contribution to the appreciation of bees. I love her poems about the bees because they are so close to how it is to be among the bees. Here's one I don't think I've posted before called "Hum."

Hum

What is this dark hum among the roses?
The bees have gone simple, sipping,
that’s all. What did you expect? Sophistication?
They’re small creatures and they are
filling their bodies with sweetness, how could they not
moan in happiness? The little
worker bee lives, I have read, about three weeks.
Is that long? Long enough, I suppose, to understand
that life is a blessing. I have found them-haven’t you?—
stopped in the very cups of the flowers, their wings
a little tattered-so much flying about, to the hive,
then out into the world, then back, and perhaps dancing,
should the task be to be a scout-sweet, dancing bee.
I think there isn’t anything in this world I don’t
admire. If there is, I don’t know what it is. I
haven’t met it yet. Nor expect to. The bee is small,
and since I wear glasses, so I can see the traffic and
read books, I have to
take them off and bend close to study and
understand what is happening. It’s not hard, it’s in fact
as instructive as anything I have ever studied. Plus, too,
it’s love almost too fierce to endure, the bee
nuzzling like that into the blouse
of the rose. And the fragrance, and the honey, and of course
the sun, the purely pure sun, shining, all the while, over
all of us.

I've posted other poems of hers here, here and here.

The natural world has lost a beautiful voice with her death.

The Cycle of Life

Of course, I'm still thinking about how it was that the hive was chosen to be robbed.  Then I think it was part of the cycle of life.  It's one of the things that happens in nature, part of the bigger picture that I am too small a speck in the universe to see how it fits into the scheme of things.

I grew up in a town that then and still now only held about 16,000 people.  It is daunting to think of an entire community three times that size being wiped out in a day...which is what happened to my bee hive.

So here's another Mary Oliver poem that is right on point for this sad event:

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Black Bear in the Orchard

It was a long winter.
But the bees were mostly awake
in their perfect house,
the workers whirling their wings
to make heat.
Then the bear woke,

too hungry not to remember
where the orchard was,
and the hives.
He was not a picklock.
He was a sledge that leaned
into their front wall and came out

the other side.
What could the bees do?
Their stings were as nothing.
They had planned everything
sufficiently
except for this: catastrophe.

They slumped under the bear’s breath.
They vanished into the curl of his tongue.
Some had just enough time
to think of how it might have been --
the cold easing,
the smell of leaves and flowers

floating in,
then the scouts going out,
then their coming back, and their dancing --
nothing different
but what happens in our own village.
What pity for the tiny souls

who are so hopeful, and work so diligently
until time brings, as it does, the slap and the claw.
Someday, of course, the bear himself
will become a bee, a honey bee, in the general mixing.
Nature, under her long green hair,
has such unbendable rules,

and a bee is not a powerful thing, even
when there are many,
as people, in a town or a village.
And what, moreover, is catastrophe?
Is it the sharp sword of God,
or just some other wild body, loving its life?

Not caring a whit, black bear
blinks his horrible, beautiful eyes,
slicks his teeth with his fat and happy tongue,
and saunters on.

Mary Oliver in New and Selected Poems: Vol.2

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Honey at the Table

Mary Oliver's poem about honey at the table comforts me as I am mourning my lost hive from yesterday:

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.

(from American Primitive by Mary Oliver)

Today, August 5, is the birthday for two of my daughters, Sarah and Becky, born two years apart on the same day.  We'll have dinner tonight to celebrate Sarah who lives in Atlanta and there will be honey at the table.

I'm making profiteroles with honey lavender ice cream as a "birthday cake" for Sarah tonight and the honey will, of course, come from our bees.:

Becky, my other daughter whose birthday is today, lives in Cumberland, Maryland, or I would have her over for dinner as well.