Welcome

Hi, my name is Alys Jackson and I'm an author and poet

based in Adelaide, South Australia.

My work has been published in books, magazines,

anthologies and online.

Butternut Bees

She kneels before her vestal virgins,

prayerful, pious, beneath the underbelly

of a cauterizing summer wind.

 

Vigorous, trailing, heavy with life,

butternuts strip the soil bare;

gorging on the Eucharist of

pig slurry and the juice

of a hundred sacrificial worms.

The ground reeks with her offerings

to a pulpit-priest that

will not be appeased.

 

There will be no forgiveness.

 

Too hot, too dry,

her bees, the few that still remain,

stutter and retreat into a savage shade.

They will not, cannot, sex her offspring;

not this season.

Not for all her prayers

and ardent pleadings.

 

And when the time comes

she will need to pluck

the stamen from the males,

to press pollen into pistil, forcing

life where none sustains –

or suffer another season without.

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