SCRAPING THE HONEY JAR
And your Lord inspired the bees:
"Make houses in the mountains, in the trees
and in what men construct!
Feed on every kind of fruit,
and travel the well-trod paths of your Lord!"
A drink of varying colors comes from their bellies.
In it is medicine for mankind.
In this is a sign
for people who reflect.
-- Qur'an: 16/70
Scraping the bottom of the honey jar with a spoon
I suddenly feel I've got to
get every last drop of honey
because it just might be the one
from that extra long flight to that extra-special flower,
one tiny spoonful of bee-syrup from the
bottom of the jar might even be from the
Night-Blooming Jasmine, the rare black
Catalina Calla lily, the Flugel Fruited Flute Rose that
puts out petals like zebra tongues on which a bee
alights to her peril, but she
doesn't care, she wobbles
deep in, already
off-balance with pollen, goes completely forward until she's
blinded in a dome of glowing red,
feathery tongue ecstatically flickering
and legs getting stickier
with the pistil's golden puff.
Now she's totally drunk, she struggles out and
buzzes off dizzily into the air
back to the hive, but makes an inspired
detour across white
Matilija poppies, frail petals waving like
shirts on a clothesline--she
flings herself into a giant Hieroglyphic Hibiscus
whose walls are
purplish dark with straightbacked figures
marching to the
Chamber of Mysteries--
a liquid dot, one sip of which will
put us out of all
human misery forever, is daubed on an
altar of pearl to be licked and
savored. The happy bee
dips her proboscis, twitches her
legs, flies out the
trumpeted opening again into lavender twilight,
enters the hive,
and into
perfect hexagons pure honey flows, and into the
jar in my hands also where my
late-night spoon-scrapes against glass sides don't want to miss
even one last drop of essential nectar so
possibly the exact taste from the Throne of God's
Majesty that will
illuminate us home!
_____________________
Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore