Husking the Bee Season

These cricket type things that only live twenty-four hours
having been buried half a century beneath ground.

Moon and stars hand lettered in love, rainbows in tandem dipping cheek to 
cheek
the last tango of torrential light husking the bee season, pollinating the 
night sky.

And the halos of ice crystals bending the fletcher`s one good eye
the shaking palsy of white dwarfs, the twinkling true sentience, asterisks of unending light.

Bluffing shadows in the riddle of a rogue sun, a painful, last cheerful hour wringing its hands,
the face of the invisible unveiled, the dark lantern illuminating only 
itself.

And here in the helix of one cell, in the cocktail of Hemlock and honest Athenian wine,
the Greek phlox that grimaces, in the slaughterhouse of rain.

Ancient quarrels, witch-hunted by a menacing glance
banishing the quixotic fables of both poets and gods alike.

Opaque birds, flying through the slat of the kitchen door, telling tales out of school
space and plastic time, death chasing the plume of its chrysalis.

What shackles the phantom limb of utter squalor, the music box of rage
the limitless self-pity of those for whom no act or word is flesh enough to 
be real.

In the pleated rubble, a ribbon of days, fossils of lunar moss,
washed out in the scrimmage of its own memory, the rusted animal steeled in 
the grind.

The musk of twilight, in the dusking bazaar, of the labyrinthine Malthusian 
heart
the scent of turmeric, henna and sage, tossing a coin, wishing upon nothing 
at all.

And even when I fall into the jagged corners of that uneven tumble
the crimped steel lags on, filled with white fury, scuttles into the unpeeled onionskin night.

Jeff Bien is an internationally acclaimed poet, musician, activist, and highly regarded meditation and consciousness teacher. His work has been published, translated and performed in eighty countries. Recent poems have been featured in 1749 Online World Literature Magazine (Hungary), Jintian (China), The Antigonish Review, The Montreal International Poetry Anthology, Vallum, The Notre Dame Review, as well as several seminal poems, ‘As the walls came down’, ‘Kyiv’ and ‘My mother in Gaza’, which have been rendered into more than thirty languages, are to be released by a prominent Italian filmmaker, as a poetic documentary and accompanying short films, in April/May 2025.