American Life in Poetry: ‘Stung’ by Heid E. Erdrich

The University of Minnesota Press has published a wonderful new collection of bee poems, “If Bees Are Few,” which may in some small way help the bees and will certainly offer some honey to poetry lovers. Here’s just one poem, by Heid E. Erdrich, who lives in Minnesota. Her most recent book is “Cell Traffic: New and Selected Poems” from the University of Arizona Press.

Stung

She couldn’t help but sting my finger,

clinging a moment before I flung her

to the ground. Her gold is true, not the trick

evening light plays on my roses.

She curls into herself, stinger twitching,

gilt wings folded. Her whole life just a few weeks,

and my pain subsided in a moment.

In the cold, she hardly had her wits to buzz.

No warning from either of us:

she sleeping in the richness of those petals,

then the hand, my hand, cupping the bloom

in devastating force, crushing the petals for the scent.

And she mortally threatened, wholly unaware

that I do this daily, alone with the gold last light,

in what seems to me an act of love.

Poem copyright 2016 by Heid E. Erdrich from “If Bees Are Few: A Hive of Bee Poems” (University of Minnesota Press, 2016), and reprinted by by permission of the author and publisher. American Life in Poetry is supported by the Poetry Foundation and the English department at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. We do not accept unsolicited submissions.