The Turkish Bee by Laurel Trivelpiece

The Turkish Bee
by Laurel Trivelpiece

Like a furry screw a Turkish bee hovers
Above our café table.

Is he here:

to plug up holes made
by blind gods waving sieves?

to celebrate this basket
of fresh bread, balanced
on a pinpoint of time rushing by?

—to unwind his reality,
one quick capsule,
riding his single shot
for all it’s worth?

He sees his way by signs he sets up
as he goes. Wanting and getting one and

the same: no singing, no blurring,
no kiting off after distant glimmers:

those are always half moons of sheep
high on the rocky Anatolian hills.

We watch how he fizzles as the sunlight
Passes through him.

PHOTO: Bee collecting honey from flower in Istanbul. Photo by Ertürk Buluç, used by permission.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Laurel Trivelpiece (1926–1998) was an American poet and novelist. She worked in her youth as fruit-picker and, after graduating from the University of California at Berkeley with a bachelor’s degree in English Literature, as an editor and copywriter for Macys and other department stores in the San Francisco Bay Area. She lived in Corte Madera, California. Publications include two poetry collections, four young adult novels, one adult novel, and prize-winning fiction and plays. Her second poetry collection, Blue Holes (1987), won the Beatrice Hawley Award, and one of her poems was included in Best American Poetry 1995. Her poems also appeared in literary journals and magazines including Poetry, The Massachusetts Review, The American Poetry Review, and The Malahat Review.  Her short story “Gentle Constancy” (Denver Quarterly, Fall) was acknowledged in the Distinctive Short Stories, 1970 list in The Best American Short Stories, 1971.