Tag Archives: destructor parasite

I’m worried. What will happen when Global Warming, Big AG and the pharmaceutical companies kill our pollinators? Here’s my sextina in protest.

 

The sun a spotlight on my metal chair warming

my face tilted up to soak the afternoon’s silence

as sun and land secretly conspire to riotous disorder

sprouting and blooming and bringing forth bees

and ants, gopher snakes and the pair of crows to forage

to mate; my garden their abundant future.

Yet politicians scupper Earth’s viable future

the creatures too busy living to anticipate global warming

as habitats shrink and humans mismanage the forage

and the crops, poisoning for profit the natural world to silence,

unconcerned with topics of little interest like bees

and their Honey Bee Colony Collapse Disorder.

Children of Earth—all affected by this disorder.

Without our pollinators we have no future.

With every bite of dinner remember the bees

industrious from blossom to flower that teem in the warming

spring after the sluicing winter, their tiny buzzing silence

shrinking, a muted reminder of loss of nutritious forage.

Incomprehensible and cruel this throwing off of forage

this dismissal of reality as Earth spirals to disorder.

The presidential request of scientists’ silence,

the denial we have nothing but a bright future

making America great as global warming

dries farmlands to dust and starving the bees,

already confused by neonicotinoids, bees

losing their way, unable to fly from forage

to hive. Monsanto, Dow, Bayer aiding the warming

with aggressive pesticides that cause disorder

to the natural cycle. Only super viruses survive the future

as Varroa, the destructor parasite sends bees to silence.

We must tabulate the evidence and fill the silence

with the real news. Gone the clover, the alfalfa. Our bees

are starving and the almond crop is dwindling. In our future:

the memory of honey and butter spread on hot toast as we forage

the cupboard for a remnant of natural food, but find disorder

of empty plastic containers, the leavings of the Earth’s warming.

 

I offer the other beings my acre of forage.

My bees and I are saving seed for the coming disorder.

To plant a field of wildflowers—my policy of warming.