Late afternoon slants, illuminates
the worn, white husk of hive and gleams
like an incubator bulb on the oval of an egg.
This might have been the way I was born
to move over my mother and wash from her
what was left of painful birth, her legs 
like the old wood cracked with a hive tool,
my lips clamping and the bees burrowing
into honeycomb, bathed in sweetness,
a taste fresher when robbed this way.

Smoke to calm, to push the heaving down,
down to the center where the queen hides
and is stroked, flanked by the upturned rumps
of guard bees, wings fanning scent in warning. 

We open this small universe and set it in motion,
a new heart ready to be fed and broken and fed again,
gathering strength to reseal and take into itself
what we leave behind: fingerprints
through broken comb and crushed drones.

This might have been the way I was born
and then set to life: stolen honey clinging
to light hair that covers everything new.
Like late afternoon sunlight, a kiss
on my dented forehead, mother collapsed and emptied
of poison, barbed stinger and the baby, the jelly, the bee.