Poetry Friday & “Exhortation to a bee” by Tabatha Yeatts

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It’s Poetry Friday! Catherine at Reading to the Core is hosting!

Just as the bees are wringing the last nectar from the summer flowers, I’m bedazzled by the next-to-last of my poem swap poems. What a grand summer it has been, and what a balm these friendships have been!

Here is, quite possibly, my favorite poem Tabatha has ever written. But I’m biased. 🙂 Jane Austen *and* bees? Perfection!

Exhortation to a bee
By Tabatha Yeatts
For Keri

 My present elegancies have not yet made me indifferent to such matters. I am still a cat if I see a mouse. 

~Jane Austen in a letter to her sister

When laden low
and wandering drowsily,
humming a song
of your own invention
as your belly hangs
down, full of sucre soup,
and your legs, ablaze with gold,
dazzle dust specks
that float even more lazily
than you –

berate yourself not,
when even in this lumbering
state, with appointed tasks ahead,
you find yourself drifting
toward a bloom that has just
come of age –

like an author
when she sees a
swath of untouched page,
when a flower opens –
a bee is still a bee.

Author: Keri

11 thoughts on “Poetry Friday & “Exhortation to a bee” by Tabatha Yeatts

  1. So much to like about Tabatha’s poem, not the least of which is “lumbering.” What a fine and unexpected word!

  2. Love love love! This would have to be a new favorite of mine, too, among Tabatha’s poems. How great that she honors “your” bees with such words (and Jane too, of course.)
    “and your legs, ablaze with gold,
    dazzle dust specks
    that float even more lazily
    than you –”
    —bee-autiful!!

  3. It is indeed lovely, Keri. I love the idea of the state in which one cannot, will not resist one’s inclination. Tabatha has captured that feeling exactly right. “drifting
    toward a bloom that has just
    come of age –”

  4. Oh, this is wonderful. Love the way it starts with a quote…
    then…
    “you find yourself drifting
    toward a bloom that has just
    come of age –

    like an author
    when she sees a
    swath of untouched page,”

    Perfectly and elegantly stated. And so true.

  5. Keri, dazzle dust specks brightened my day of labored tasks. To come to this poem as the first one of Poetry Friday to read is like unwrapping a package. I think you should read this to your bees to see if they fancy this poem.

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