III. Honey

III. Honey

Bees move through clover fields

gathering what the world gives freely.

Dust of yellow.

Sweetness hidden in flowers

small as thumbnails.

Inside the hive

they turn weather into honey.

No one argues

whether honey is real.

Human beings make something too.

Not gold.

Not flame.

Meaning.

We collect fragments:

a father's habit of clearing his throat,

headlines, prayers,

the smell of wet denim,

half a joke overheard in line

at the grocery store.

We carry these back

to the dark rooms of ourselves.

There we thicken them.

We store them in stories,

songs, courtrooms, classrooms,

wedding toasts, graveyards.

Almost everything we believe

was touched by other hands first.

Language itself

is inherited honey.

And still

we keep adding to it.