My mother in each hand brandishes a pan.
Breaking for the back door
she bounds the hill, leaving lunch
to burn on the stove top.

Her desperation drives back alpacas
from the fence,
while the two brother donkeys bray
their long alarm.

The bees are all over, arguing
fiercely, fifty-thousand plaints
for a staked claim to the sky; roiling clamor
in whatever calamity

put them out, beating the breast of their hive
wildly overhead—my mother beats
in sync like a charmed pitch
meant to match

the blackcapped maniacs she hopes
to snatch back from the brink,
her frenzied movements a kind
of hypnosis,

the collecting sign of chaos—cry havoc
and the bees at once gather,
confederate in their panic,
in the nearby Silverbell shrubs.

I learn later how she’s done it—tanging’s
the word for all that banging,
meant to corral the swarm to shelter;
history’s unclear

why it works—but like a trance it falls, the sound,
maybe of disaster in the racket
so mutiny takes a back seat
to staying alive,

and hunkering down the bees
drive like clenched fists
into the skeletal branches, still vocal
in annoyance,

but adequately distracted now so we don
jumpsuits and shake
from branches queen and all, back in the box
we’ve wrought for them.

How like protectors we are, beating
against their baser natures:
beasts who waste the place we’ve made
in abundance of Oxeye daisies,

St. John’s wart, black-eyed Susans,
Queen Anne’s Lace—
plenty, for their purposes. No need
to break like prisoners from their cells;

no need to want past the measure
exactly provided.

– Joshua Kulseth