And this is called "The Matriarch"
and I have something I want to say about that.
That Professor Robbins has been telling me
about the bees, the honeybees.
They are dying all over the world
and perhaps the honeybee population has
been reduced by half, he says.
Terrible thing to contemplate.
And working bees push the drones out of the hive
after the queen has been fertilized.
And since they've been cared for until this time, why,
it's likely that they don't survive long.
And the male bee, the king, also dies in the marriage flight.
And it's called "The Matriarch."
It's about bees.
A queen in the heaven of her reign
lies on the matron's honeyed bed.
Her swains who beat the gauzy heir to wed her,
tattered in love's wear, are swept from the hive
or cruelly slain.
While he who entered her is dead,
ripped in the pitch of his queen's loins
with the murmuring kingdom bred.
A queen housed in her royal cell, fed mead of clover,
foxgloved spice, aromatics chewed more than twice
by inexorable law must dwell.
Her watchful ladies mix her food.
She swells the ranks of the burnished brood.
A queen who burned and charged the sun, charged comet
with a tail of drones, is a bellied, fat, and wingless
thing upon her stroked and tended couch.
A mighty sightless breeding one where wax hexagonals of thrones
entomb the matriarch.
The king, in parts, fell through the air
he trimmed, dangled and dragged his most prized pouch.
Deaf to the chorus he had hymned.