Hayan Charara's "Bees, Honeycombs, Honey"

Thoughts on diminishment.

Bees, Honeycombs, Honey

Bees, thousands and thousands,
surviving in a hive
under the soffit; bees,
honeycombs, and honey,
and dampness, and old wood
sticky in the sunlight;

and the beekeeper’s hand,
carefully, and slowly,
vacuuming, and taking;
the bees tumbling gently
into the makeshift hive;
honeybees, and honeycombs,

and honey, glistening;
honey, the only food
that will not spoil; honey,
pulled from the pyramids,
still sticky and sweet,
thousands of years later;

I may not believe, but
I want to; and the bees
before my eyes are now
disappearing; bees God
in the Qur’an inspired
to build homes in mountains

and trees; bees that built homes
in the trees near the grave
in Detroit; and the bees
in Jerusalem’s graves;
bees in every city,
and in every age; bees,

honey, and honeycombs,
through disaster after
disaster; bees building,
and scouting, and dancing;
bees mating, protecting,
and attacking; the bees

are now disappearing,
and dying; and the bees
the beekeeper cannot
save are dying but still
guarding the empty hive,
butting their heads against

the children, who will grow
into men and women,
and build homes, now dipping
fingers into honey
darkening on the ground;
they are dying; the hive

is gone; the queen is gone;
thousands and thousands, gone;
but the bees will come back,
and the hive will come back;
if not here, then elsewhere;
and there will be more bees

making more honeycombs,
more honey, and more bees;
and one day all the bees
will be gone; gone, and gone;
honeycombs, and houses,
gone; and trees, gone; oak, elm,

birch, gone; all trees, flowers,
gone; and birds, leaves, branches,
cicadas, and crickets,
grasshoppers, ants, worms, gone;
and cities, and rivers,
big cities, small cities,

big rivers, small rivers,
gardens, and homes; and homes;
the bees will be gone, and
only their honey will
survive, and we will not
be around to taste it.



from These Trees, Those Leaves, That Flower, That Fruit (Milkweed Editions, 2022)

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I wrote about Hayan Charara’s work nearly three years ago, in one of my first posts for this newsletter, and I am writing about it again because I love it. I love it for its tenderness toward the world, and also for its playfulness, its surprise. What does Galway Kinnell write? “The dream / of all poems / and the text / of all loves—‘Tenderness toward Existence.’” 

That’s how I feel about Charara’s work, which I have been spending time with recently because I finally started reading his latest book — These Trees, Those Leaves, That Flower, That Fruit. And, if it’s okay, I think I’d like to use today’s poem as a kind of stand-in to talk about a few of Charara’s poems, and what I love about them, and what they make me consider.

Today’s poem does this beautiful thing where it unfolds and unfurls itself down the page — a single sentence. It almost enacts what Charara describes of bees: 

the bees tumbling gently
into the makeshift hive

Just like these lines describe, the words of today’s poem do tumble gently. They tumble together and sideways and downward, bumping into one another like bees, pausing and starting and moving from one place to another and back again. They feel, in so doing, like they comprise a poem that is a makeshift thing. And in this way, today’s poem reminds me that poems can be like this. That they can be these makeshift things, tumbling gently down the page. Or fervently. Or with anger or with love. However and whatever.

Today’s poem mentions the word honey (or any word containing the word honey) fourteen times, not including the title. There are nineteen mentions of bees. Forty-four uses of the word and. There are thirty-four semi-colons. There are sixty-two commas. There is one single period, nestled right there at the poem’s end, which is also — in some sense — the world’s end. In some ways, this makes the poem resemble something like a life, which is a thing bursting with the so-much-ness of so much, a thing that does not end until it does, and, as it continues, continues with the breath called for by a comma, the long pause to reconsider offered by a semi-colon, and the bursting, generous, hand-reaching-into-the-dark gesture called for by an and. Over and over again.

When I read a poem like this, I am reminded — as I am often, writing these little essays — that a poem can model how to live a life, not necessarily in a way that is instructive or prescriptive, but rather in a way that is more of an offering. An offering, an allowance, an offering again. A way of saying: hey, if you find yourself spinning, or tumbling — if you find yourself bumping into yourself, stopping and starting, sometimes holding your breath, sometimes gasping for it — if you find yourself doing this or that, talking fast to yourself, doubling-back on what you said, wondering if you’re annoying whoever it is you think you’re annoying — yes, if you find yourself thinking too much or catching yourself looking at the clouds, well, if this is the case — here is a poem that moves the way you do, that breathes and doubts like you. 

And what I love, too, about today’s poem is that, though I might call it a poem of excess — by which I mean that it resists its own ending, that it allows itself to continue, to tumble down the page, to and itself toward more attention — it is not necessarily a poem about excess. In fact, it perhaps gestures toward the opposite. Yes, the poem begins with this image:

Bees, thousands and thousands,
surviving in a hive
under the soffit

And yes, though this poem begins with thousands and thousands of bees, even this is not a kind of excess. Instead, it is a kind of intimacy, these bees living as they are lodged and barely surviving in a hive underneath the awning of a home. These bees being some minute percentage of the so much larger (though dwindling) population of bees in the world. So, instead of being about excess, Charara’s poem is a kind of intimate attention. The excess in this poem is our own. The excess of disaster after / disaster. The excess that causes the bees to die. As Charara zooms out, he reminds us, too, of the intimacies we will lose:

gardens, and homes; and homes

Such a moment reminds me of another of Charara’s poems, “Elegy with Apples, Pomegranates, Bees, Butterflies, Thorn Bushes, Oak, Pine, Warblers, Crows, Ants, and Worms.” In that poem, Charara writes:

The mantra today is the same as yesterday.
We must become different.
The plants must, the animals,
and the ants and worms, just like the carmakers,
the soap makers before them,
and the manufacturers of rubber
and the sellers of tea, tobacco, and salt.
Such an ancient habit, making ourselves new.

Yes, I think. It is an ancient habit. Yes, it is today’s mantra. And for what, I wonder. And for what, I wonder again. In a small paragraph written about this poem, Charara says the following:

I began the poem with fruit in mind, apples specifically, and not my mother, and definitely not as an elegy, but that I went there is no surprise. I’m almost the same age my mother was when she died, a fact I let hover over me. Be that as it may, for a long time now I’ve felt that all my poems, ultimately, are elegies, even when—especially when—they are bursting with life.

I love that mournful, honest idea — that a poem can be an elegy even and especially when it is bursting with life. Perhaps there is no better way of describing what it feels like to write — and live — in this present moment, with such a keen awareness of what there is to lose and what has been lost. 

Lately I’ve been reading the French writer Maël Renouard’s Fragments of an Infinite Memory (proof, as usual, that anything published by NYRB absolutely rules). It’s a layered, tangential book that interrogates the consequences of the internet’s existence through personal observations and anecdotes and musings and historical context and much more. I found myself so struck by one moment, when Renouard writes:

The leap of imagination, which establishes the maximum gap between imagination and technique, also sets the reduction of this gap as the goal of the history of mind. We have now begun to live in the asymptotic stage of the curve that represents this gap.

In other words: the first goal of the imagination is to dream up something different than reality, and the second goal of the imagination is to make that imagined world some real world in the future. In this current moment, Renouard seems to be saying, we live with such a diminished gap between what we can imagine and what can become a reality. Because of the speed at which we live, and the near infinite ways in which what we dream can almost instantly become a reality, such things — our imagination and our reality — are almost one and the same. Later in the book, Renouard makes a finer point about images and reality:

There are so many images of everything nowadays that we have always already seen what we are about to see—be it an apartment for rent, the hotel in which we are going to spend a few nights for the holidays, the man we are supposed to meet for an interview, etc…More and more, we compare reality to images, instead of comparing images to reality.

It’s hard for me not to draw a connection between the diminished gap I just mentioned and the diminished gap that Charara mentions — the one that exists between an elegy and a life. Just as we live in a world where we have already seen what we are about to see, or have only just dreamed of what is about to become a reality, we also live in a world where we are always preparing to say goodbye to what we have only just encountered. We live, each day, toggling between moments of quick, near instantaneous technological progress — which is one of many terms we use for the realization of the imagination — and moments of mass death — either of human life or natural life or both at once — that occur with terrifying frequency. Part of me feels deeply that, if what we choose to imagine becomes equal to and intersects the same line that marks our propensity for progress and speed, then our elegies will become the same things as our lives — we will, in other words, mourn ourselves and our world with each breath we take. In that world, I think, it will become harder and harder to imagine differently; it will become harder and harder to think of the imagination not as something that is equal to what we think of as progress, but as something more patient, and kind — an imagination that works in favor of slowness rather than speed, of intimate attention rather than instant gratification.

Maybe, I’m wondering, imagination should be more closely related to attention. I’m thinking of the word honey — how frequently it is said in today’s poem. The word bees — how much it occurs. I’m thinking of what it means to hold still and look at something long enough to say this is alive, and me, too — isn’t that enough? I’m thinking of another of Charara’s poems, “The Symbolic Life,” where his speaker looks at a growing pile of ladybugs gathering on his windowsill, wondering about what they might symbolize. At the poem’s end, Charara writes:

This went on and on, and could’ve gone on
forever, so finally I opened the window
and blew them into the wide open
because everything and everyone should get a chance
to be mourned, and they got theirs,
but first they had to die, which is life,
not symbolism.

Too often, I think, our imagination tends toward metaphor, making of the natural world something symbolic, something that might teach us how to live. And too often, I think, our current capitalistic death drive has seized on the accessibility of metaphor to ease our society into its current state of near-constant progress at the expense of so much. Perhaps more important than such propensity toward symbolism are the twin nouns and verbs of acknowledgment and attention. Instead of imagining something different of the life that is in front of us, something that might ease our misgivings or even make us more certain about our own push toward progress, perhaps it might be better to simply acknowledge such life as it is. As life itself. Not as a balm to calm the burn of our rush toward a more modern world. 

I rely on the ease of metaphor all the time. I turn toward metaphor so much that even that act of turning has become a cliche. I imagine myself so frequently and so scarily easily as someone or something else that it has dulled the possibility of reimagining myself as myself. This is what I mean when I think of how Maël Renouard talks of the diminishing gap between imagination and technique. I have to remind myself of the honest, attentive, and generous labor that is real imaginative work. The kind of work that acknowledges the trends of the world as it is, the dangerous paths that have been carved, and seeks to say, as a result of such acknowledgment: what if or what if not or how about this or how about we don’t do that. Refusal. Return. Rewild. Reimagine. The re at the start of each word reminds me that sometimes it is a more imaginative work to turn back, to pause, to say no, to say again. And today’s poem reminds me that it is a kind of imaginative work to sit in the same place, to pay attention long enough to say the word honey fourteen times, to say the word bees nineteen times.

It’s funny. Years ago, when I first wrote about Charara’s work, I talked about “learning” from it. That was a true statement; I don’t think it was a lie. But, as I’ve read and written about poems in these years, I hesitate to think anymore of poems as instructive things. It’s not that they can’t be, or that they can’t — especially in their craft — be things that are learned from. But I think to only talk about a poem in such a way — as an object worth learning from — is a kind of diminishment. It would be the same as only looking at the earth as a form of metaphor. What I find myself learning, so often, is how much I must unlearn.

So yes, when I look again at today’s poem, I can see it, at once, as an elegy for all that has lived, a litany for all that will die, and an enactment of a life that is full of near constant loss and doubt and so much else. But there’s something else, too. There are four adverbs in this poem. They are, in order: carefully, slowly, gently, and still. I’m not trying to take these words as instruction or prescription. I am simply acknowledging them, and in such acknowledgment, I am reminded that there is tenderness here, amidst the loss, that I don’t have to look away to find it. I don’t have to keep turning, and taking, and creating. I don’t have to make something new out of all of this. It’s here — the tenderness. Among all of it, it’s here.

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Some Notes:

1. As I mentioned last week, I was grateful to have an essay come out in Longreads not long ago — about fragility, presentness, anxiety, and love. Give it a read if you’d like!

2. I’ve been watching the Oscar-nominated shorts — animated, live action, documentary. I haven’t made it through all of them, but this animated film about a father and son delivering ice each day by jumping off a cliff (and also about the accumulation of grief, and the power of love), is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen. I mean that sincerely.

3. A recurring note: If you’ve read any of the recent newsletters, you’ve perhaps noticed that I am offering a subscription option. This is functioning as a kind of “tip jar.” If you would like to offer your monetary support as a form of generosity, please consider becoming a paid subscriber below. There is no difference in what you receive as a free or paid subscriber; to choose the latter is simply an option to exercise your generosity if you feel willing. I am grateful for you either way. Thanks for your readership.