Bees Were Better

In 2017 in his introduction to Column 661 of American Life in Poetry, Ted Kooser, who served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006, wrote in part, "The University of Minnesota Press has published a fine collection of bee poems, If Bees Are Few. Here's one by one of my favorite poets, Naomi Shihab Nye, who lives in San Antonio. . . . "

"In college, people were always breaking up." So begins Naomi Shihab Nye's poem "Bees Were Better" (2008). To read that poem in its entirety, click here.

Image above by Neha Singh from Pixabay

Look

In "All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten" (1986), the essay of his that became a classic, Robert Fulghum wrote in part, "And then remember the Dick-and-Jane books and the first word you learned -- the biggest word of all -- LOOK." In his poem "The Starlight Night" (reprinted below) Gerard Manley Hopkins used the word look seven times.

THE STARLIGHT NIGHT

by Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889)

Look at the stars! look, look up at the skies!

    O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air!

    The bright boroughs, the circle-citadels there!

Down in dim woods the diamond delves! the elves'-eyes!

The grey lawns cold where gold, where quickgold lies!

    Wind-beat whitebeam! airy abeles set on a flare!

    Flake-doves sent floating forth at a farmyard scare! --

Ah well! it is all a purchase, all is a prize.

Buy then! bid then! -- What? -- Prayer, patience, alms, vows.

Look, look: a May-mess, like on orchard boughs!

    Look! March-bloom, like on mealed-with-yellow sallows!

These are indeed the barn; withindoors house

The shocks. This piece-bright paling shuts the spouse

    Christ home, Christ and his mother and all his hallows.

The First Dandelion

THE FIRST DANDELION

from Leaves of Grass (1892) by Walt Whitman

Simple and fresh and fair from winter's close emerging,

As if no artifice of fashion, business, politics, had ever been,

Forth from its sunny nook of shelter'd grass -- innocent, golden, calm as the dawn,

The spring's first dandelion shows its trustful face.

Image by Markus Koch from Pixabay