(after Karen An-hwei Lee’s “Prayer for a Bamboo-Flowering Famine”)
All Rise & Recite:
May we settle on a planet near a lavender sun
where nothing is bitter or greedy or cruel. May we stand on a turret-stone
on the unbroken planet, and look out at the ruins
of all the things that came before us
and see all the things that will come. May we wander through the ruins
of the castle below, alongside the slow wind
whistling through the ivy-strung arches, strung with things resembling
the things we had on Earth. Let us never forget
the Earth, or its handfuls of warm, sun-soaked soil, shining with the miracle
of the minerals that sustained us, and the vegetables,
and the bees. May we never forget the floccose fat
bodies of the bees, the way their colonies purred.
May we find the body of a wingless bee
and lay it to rest in a cardboard earring box, on a cushion
of filmy cotton no bigger than a leaf.
May we recite this prayer over the stillness of the bee
until the soft drone of rain drowns us out.
May we bury the bee in moss, as if we are planting
something, holding in our fingers
the memory of Earth.
May we have enough breath to wait here
long enough for something floccose to grow.