Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

The heather bloomed best out by the blowy beaches to the west.
We took the hives out there to the sea when the russet clover
was fading inland by the fjord, came with the red-lacquered Ford
that had room for six hives in the boot.
It was all about finding sanctuary from a wind
that’s never still here.

When I was a child with dad in the eight-cylinder Ford
I thought in my child-like way that, as in the song, there lay foxes under
the roots of the birches,
as we slowly drove by the dirt tracks west in the evenings
after the worker bees had come into their hives again
their back feet laden with nectar and pollen.

On rainy days we started out sooner, for then the bees
crept about inside with their glistening wings and worked at feeding
                                                                                      their larvae
and transforming nectar into honey in cells of wax. Thousands, yes,
perhaps fifty thousand on the move in each of their hives
in the back of the car that dad and I drove out in.

I thought as the car curled softly round the rain-grey fjord
that it must have been great to know Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson. Dad
agreed he must have been
a fine fellow, but that he was dead now. I looked for foxes
but the roots were difficult to see now beneath the birches
from the car windows – they flickered by, and after we’d come further
out towards the sea
their trunks were thinner and wild chervil grew in the ditches
and feet-high foxgloves with ringed bells of purple
before we came out to the fields of heather.

It was in one of the thunder summers I thought such thoughts in the
Ford. Lightning
flickered across the sky, but we murmured in the downpour afterwards,
mostly about Bjørnson. Dad steered
and I sat and pumped small clouds of smoke into the back of the car
towards bees that crept from impossible cracks.

When we stopped by some rocks in the heather it was a case of not
slipping
among the roots and mud and wet stones as we bore out hives
humming
from the boot of the Ford and up the path to where they could stand
sheltered from the wind
from the sea. I got the wild scent of wax and honey in my nostrils
as I bore the hive close to my child’s chest and neck; I sensed
the bees boiling on the inner wall of the hive. The song about the fox
under the birch roots
was swelling within me in the cloudburst that followed the lightning
that split the Atlantic in two, as in the Bible, and a bull-like rumbling
arose
from the ocean depths, and spread over the coast where dad and I
stood furthest out,
a beehive between us.

Thus: dad and I, yoked together, with fifty thousand bees crawling
about in the hive
we held, while heaven and earth were ripped to shreds about us. As we
stood there
in our boots, and the storm drove in over the land towards
Trollheimen,
Hallingskarvet and Sweden, we set the hives in the heather,
went down to the car and fetched the others.
Our feet had found a fine rhythm now, and I considered that
Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson too
had been a boy here, and had thought about foxes under the birch
roots
further in by the fjord.

We put on our protective headgear with veils that fell down
over our shoulders, and secured all the zips in the trousers
and jackets of those white protective suits,
until we might have been from some American film about creatures
from outer space
who land on earth – one large and one little creature. I had the task
of pumping the smoke; I broke off small pieces of charcoal which I
dropped into the smoker
and lit with a match. The smoke billowed till dad removed the boards
that covered the mouths of the hives, and the bees streamed out –
at first they kept in clouds in the air above the hives

then all at once one group veered off, out over the heather
while the others descended to the hives
or crawled about on our protective suits. We stood utterly still, dad
and myself, out there by the shore against the ocean that August night,
seeing the bees
coming back like bright pillars beneath the rainbow spanned out huge
above us.

We saw them drift down to their respective hives and hover, their
wings like wheels in the air –
just inches over the roofs of the hives – hover a few seconds
before rising in great rings over the hives
and moving slowly in the same great dance out towards the honey-wet
heather,
swarm after swarm following, a hum over the whole of the heavens.