Page 87 - Dark Matter:Women Witnessing Issue2

HOMAGE TO BEES

Alexandra Merrill

In September 2007, while walking with friends, single file through the ancient Arc of Appalachia,

countless swarming bees appear among us. We keep walking, casually and stupidly, brushing them

away. Suddenly their focus centers in on my body and I am under the siege of their collective strike.

Severely allergic to bee venom, I realize I must get to a safe house. I walk there and lie down on the

floor of a quiet room. I slide quickly into an anaphylactic shock state from which, with help of friends

and emergency medicine, I will later return.

For now, I offer my attempt to bring image and words to the impact of that collaborative journey of

mutual affliction, to the wise teachings from the bees as well as I can translate them, and then finally,

to my gratitude for the honor of bearing witness to their suffering and our complicity in creating their

struggle.

A maternity of bees: the story of my journey into and out of anaphylactic shock

Still hearing my own words as a tail wind, “a good day to die,” I wing up, weightless to where nothing is

broken apart, where all that has been long broken is waiting to be made whole by being told. Here, I

am torn and whole, folded into patchwork clouds, untethered from time, reviewing a summer

afternoon of 1944 and we are at war and I am 6 and busy, killing garden bees with Grandma’s red DDT

sprayer gun. I will spray them until they’re dead because I love her and she told me to use the gun.

Squirting the smelly sprayer barrel over and over until they’re all down in the dirt under the roses, I am

ashamed to enjoy watching the bees falling down dead. I loved the little bees when they used to come

sit here on my chubby fingers.

My eyes are down in shame. I can take a deep breath away from shame. Now I am sliding down into an

old stump hole. Here, a full-­‐ bellied honeycomb, glowing in her own dark luster hums an endless prayer

for all the wrongful deaths. Curling my cloud self around the waxy prayer body and inhaling honey

scent, I am forgiving my small heart and Grandma’s old one. Shame is weakening. I breathe again, in

and then out, more easily this time.

89