Hum
by: Mary Oliver
What is this dark hum among the roses?
The bees have gone simple, sipping,
that's all. What did you expect? Sophistication?
They're small creatures and they are
filling their bodies with sweetness, how could they not
moan in happiness? The little
worker bee lives, I have read, about three weeks.
Is that long? Long enough, I suppose, to understand
that life is a blessing. I have found them--haven't you?--
stopped in the very cups of the flowers, their wings
a little tattered--so much flying about, to the hive,
then out into the world, then back, and perhaps dancing,
should the task be to be a scout--sweet, dancing bee.
I think there isn't anything in this world I don't
admire. If there is, I don't know what it is. I
haven't met it yet. Nor expect to. The bee is small,
and since I wear glasses, so I can see the traffic and
read books, I have to
take them off and bend close to study and
understand what is happening. It's not hard, it's in fact
as instructive as anything I have ever studied. Plus, too,
it's love almost too fierce to endure, the bee
nuzzling like that into the blouse
of the rose. And the fragrance, and the honey, and of course
the sun, the purely pure sun, shining, all the while over
all of us.
I haven't seen any bees yet this spring. Usually, when my lilac bushes bloom, they are swarmed with worker bees. Perhaps because we have experienced a fairly cool May and early June, the bees aren't moving yet. Or maybe the bees that haunt my backyard every summer have found a better place to fill their bodies with sweetness.
I've always taken those bees for granted. Ever since I moved into this house going on three decades ago, those little workers have appeared every May to sip and dance. Yet, here I am in 2023, with half the year gone, and not a single dark hum among the lilacs can be heard in my backyard. The silence is pretty deafening.
If there's one thing that the last six or seven years have taught me it's that the world, and all that's in it, is temporary, including bees and trees, rocks and rivers, forests and friends. Everything will eventually disappear. Eight years ago, I was one of nine siblings. Both of my parents were alive. My friend, Helen, was still hosting solstice ceremonies and yoga workshops. "Loss" was not a word that passed through my mind or lips very often.
Now, I am one of six living siblings. Both of my parents have shuffled off this mortal coil. And Helen has made the transition from presence to memory, quickly taking on the mantle of myth. All of my dead have returned to dust, their elemental carbon, flecked with bits of bone and teeth. These bodies we inhabit for a short time on this planet are merely vessels--impermanent and imperfect.
I'm not a person who holds on to curls of hair or wears a locket engraved with the whorls and scars of lost loved ones' thumbprints. On this thumbprint of a planet, we are not what we are made of--not the fists of heart clenching and unclenching in our chests. Not the boats of lungs cradling and shuttling oxygen to brains and limbs. No.
We are more than all these parts. I am more than the muscles in my fingers that push a pen across a page, trying to capture memories and thoughts. The bees are gone. Maybe they'll eventually reappear sometime this summer, or not. I recently visited my parents' and sisters' cremation stones at the cemetery. What remains of their physicality--the shoulders I hugged, lips I kissed--is now grit and powder. They have been reduced and set free.
They were more in the deer I saw grazing grass nearby that day, slowly moving their jaws, staring at me as if I was a friend they hadn't seen in a long, long time. Someone whose name they couldn't quite remember.
Maybe the mosquitoes and bees were humming my name in their twitching ears:
Saint Marty, Saint Marty, Saint Marty.
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