Honey At Table

Duane Keiser

Honey At the Table




It fills you with the soft

essence of vanished flowers, it becomes

a trickle soft as a hair that you follow

from the honey pot over the table




and out the door and over the ground,

and all the while it thickens,




grows deeper and wilder, edged

with pine boughs and wet boulders,

pawprints of bobcat and bear, until




deep in the forest you

shuffle up some tree, you rip the bark,




you float into and swallow the dripping combs,

bits of the tree, crushed bees — a taste

composed of everything lost, in which everything

lost is found.


Mary Oliver

 "The soft essence of vanished flowers...thickens...grows deeper and wilder..."This is a transformation poem - flowers turn into honey, which in turn draws us into the forest and makes us wild and bearlike - and honey, honey is the golden ingredient of wonder. A  trickle of hope that perhaps after all nothing is lost, but is gathered and treasured and returned to us in a honey of moments and joys, a taste of Eden – wild, sweet, Home.



(Here's another great poem about honey.)

A Jar of Honey

Elena Katsyura

A Jar of Honey

You hold it like a lit bulb,

a pound of light,

and swivel the stunned glow

around the fat glass sides:

it's the sun, all flesh and no bones

but for the floating knuckle

of honeycomb

attesting to the nature of the struggle.

Jacob Polley

I think we’ve probably all held a jar of honey up to the sunlight to admire it.  It’s not just the amber old-gold colour of it, it’s the viscosity, the slow-full knowledge of its sweetness.  In literature, honey is a symbol for delight, and seeing or tasting it, there’s no question why. And Polley  - I admire his work here  – “a lit bulb”, “the stunned glow”, “the sun” , it’s all light. And the incandescent glow, the radiating delight - what is it the product of? Struggle.