The White tailed Bumblebee; A persona poem.

Bombus Lucorum’s  Dramatic monologue or Persona Poem

( Her thoughts while being photographed in January at Finca Navasola, Sierra Aracena Spain)

 

 

 

 

 

 

You may well know me as just a mere bumbling bee

But I am more clever than you think.

My lineage is pre Linnaeus *and to our own kind

We keep ourselves. It’s only you who can confuse

And give us a Bombus Lucorum complex.

If you observe more carefully

And observe you must

Our whiter than white tails, our yellow bands.

But we are more deceptive than you think:

We will not help to pollinate

We merely take the nectar sweet

With proboscis purposefully evolved,

Or tongue for you non latinates,

Adapted slowly over time.

 

I fear I speak abruptly for your kind of kind.

My life is too worn out with weary work.

My genes do not give me the time

To rest inside a burrowed hole,

Like her, with constant demands for more and more.

 

Today you see us swinging from bright flowers;

The yellow sun was kind when first we left.

Our Lady Queen insistent on our following

The path of workers gone before.

We serve, we serve the future of our kind.

We work and work and have no time

Like you to stand and stare.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Why does the weather change like this?

The stem I have to cling to fast.

The wind is strong too strong too strong for us.

My sister worker in a gust falls into fallen leaves,

So wet with days of rain, her wings can’t fly,

Too weak with days without the chance of food.

The rain it comes with furious speed.

So wet, too wet on dripping leaves.

So near, so far from the desire to feed

On flowers few in this so cold a Spring.

Why did our Lady think this was the time to breed?

So warm it was and then the weeks of rain.

The wind now stronger I too fear I’ll fall

Be blown away far from the way back home.

I fear today we came too far

Too far.

I fear today we came too far.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

*Linnaeus 1761

THANKS TO

1. Wikipedia for so much information in one place on the White tailed Bumblebee   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White-tailed_bumblebee
2. The Bumblebee Conservation Trust. And ideas to be  BEE KIND

 

This was prompted by a prompt from Dverse Poets  http://dversepoets.com/ on creating another Persona. This is a great poetry website to check out and follow links to some diverse poetry and blogs on Mr Linky.

At present this persona style is a particular challenge to me with a story I am writing about the wild. I am caught between wanting to keep the creatures wild and not really speaking but also  with the need to create empathy for the struggles they have in our very current climate.

I hope the photos are of white tailed bumblebees. Please inform me if you think otherwise! The ones on the Christmas, Butchers Broom post were the slurred and blurred ones and I have been trying ever since.  With my friend Madeleine’s Fuji camera she took one of the bumblebee on a fallen leaf. The other day when it was sunny in the morning I found two bumblebees on the yellow daisies. They were struggling as the wind was getting stronger and then it started to rain again. One fell somewhere. I put out some sugar water in case they needed more food. I wonder if they did get back to their hive. As there were two they were possibly the worker bees. A queen will usually emerge in early February and look for food and begin to build up reserves and to lay their female worker eggs. I wonder here if these bees have emerged earlier because of the warm weather in December. Nature is so incredibly complex and so well adapted over millennia. At present these bees have certain skills to help them survive but as the climate is less predictable and more extreme there may be more problems foe even the common species.

An Autumn Walk in the Sierra Aracena. The falling leaves of the ancient trees. The photography and Art of Ruth Koenigsberger

Old chestnut trees in the Sierra Aracena

I am so pleased I have the opportunity to share the photography and links to art work of my friend and neighbour Ruth. Her photographs come from walking around the countryside with her dog, the lovely Lotti. ( featured in previous posts and a surrogate dog for me at present!) When I can I walk with her and breathe in the beauty of the changing seasons we have here. I have also shown her garden with all the poppies in my previous post and haiku to Liberty, Love and Light. The link is to her art work at the Artagora Galeria Virtual Ruth Koenigsberger. I love the way she can capture both colour and light. For me there is a deep link to nature in her work and a spiritual light within her creative art. Try the link on her name and walk round a virtual art gallery too! There are  castano trees, ancient chestnuts from the Sierra and the Caldera in La Palma but also some imaginative interpretations of our world from the inner eye of an artist.

I miss all my friends in the Sierra Aracena as I have to be in the UK for a short while. Many there live a peaceful lifestyle that can bring them close to the natural world through organic gardening, permaculture, spiritual practices, yoga and of course the creative arts. It is almost a year since I wrote Bats on my Birthday and have found blogging useful to warm up my writing muscles. I hope to write more stories and poems to help us come closer to this wonderful and diverse world of nature.

For this week I want to highlight the need to care for the living systems on the planet. There are so many people who want to rise above the atrocities in Paris and send a message that we must change the way we live in this world or the living planet will suffer and not be able to give us and all other creatures the habitats and food sources we need to thrive.

As I cannot walk on the Climate Change March  on the eve of the talks in Paris I will try some virtual walks like this one in the Sierra Aracena. Let’s hold the Climate Change talks in the light  and where possible petition and campaign for the change our planet needs.

The lovely Lotti

Hollyhock and black carpenter bee in Ruth’s garden. October 2015