You blame me for the bees.
I am as alarmed as you
and I’m trying, trying so hard
to make sense of this crazy world;
the blanked out sky,
the septic sea and the ne’er fallowed land.
I escape to some imagined past;
walk around empty churches,
the anonymous gravestones
homes for lichen and moss
where no bee is ever seen,
not even on the boundary edge
where gravestones are lined,
removed from the patch of earth
they once marked, forever.
But my meanderings, I see they don’t impress.
I talk of the dead, you say I don’t care,
that I’m not doing enough.
But we all live in this purgatory,
trapped somewhere between happiness
and hell, in a toxic cauldron of opinion
where only one truth will survive,
a truth that is toxic to most –
though enshrined in the bee
copyright Francis Barker 2019
Ciscography 