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MacQueen’s Quinterly: Knock-your-socks-off Art and Literature
| Issue 29: | August 2025 |
| Poem: | 112 words |
By Roy J. Beckemeyer
Chiaroscuro
...sifting down the bee-fried air, by God, the bee-fried air!
—Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine1
Bees squirm, shove themselves out from earthen burrows just as we push our way through our mother’s pelvic girdle. Perhaps for bees, sun-gilt pollen fills each larval cell with longing, makes each bee into a seed agog with this inherent, this unconquerable need. Imagine entering spring’s heart-breaking light with the glory of untried wings to snap and flick and thrum the air, with hundred-lensed bay-window eyes to go agog at the sun-spectrum spectacle—light careening off everything, from every direction, and to somehow know, without understanding why, exactly how to live here, in this vast, unanticipated world.
Publisher’s Notes:
Links were retrieved on 25 July 2025.
- Epigraph is quoted from Ray Bradbury’s novel Dandelion Wine (page 6 of the 2001 reprint by William Morrow: HarperCollins Publishers). The book, first published by Doubleday in 1957, developed from Bradbury’s small fiction of the same title, which first appeared in the June 1953 issue of Gourmet magazine.
Nearly 50 years later, he wrote this 400-word essay about Dandelion Wine for Gourmet (September 2001), which also includes the original 600-word story from 1953:
http://www.gourmet.com.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/magazine/2000s/2001/09/dandelion-wine.html - My heartfelt gratitude to Roy for contributing this luminous poem to MacQ. Bees are my favorite insects, and I’m wonderstruck by Roy’s vision of each bee as “a seed agog with ... unconquerable need.”
- For spectacular, close-up views of pollinators conducting their lives, see My Garden of a Thousand Bees by wildlife filmmaker Martin Dohrn. During the COVID-19 lockdown in 2020, Dohrn became obsessed with the bees in his tiny urban garden in Bristol, England and was surprised to find more than 60 species there:
“...from Britain’s largest bumblebees to scissor bees the size of a mosquito.... Eventually, he gets so close to the bees, he can identify individuals just by looking at them” (PBS Nature, October 2021):
https://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/my-garden-thousand-bees-about/26263/
More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond
⚡ The Mystery of Disappearing Bees, collaborative photo-poem by Roy Beckemeyer and Skyler Lovelace reprinted in KYSO Flash (Issue 12, Summer 2019), below which also appears Roy’s photograph of a honey bee drinking nectar from Culver’s root
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