The Silent Hive

Spring shouts her arrival
Yet in the deep, the  bees sleep
Heedless
Of the robbers in the barrow.

The ants march in line by line
Stripping the hive of its amber
Wine
Careless of their benefactors.

Greed blinds them; the sticky white
Pearls stuck to the castle door
Borne
Deep into the bowels of their temple

A doom they consume gladly
Washing it down with their stolen booty
Dreaming
Of future raids, as their lidless eyes

Dim and fade.  Do the bees they starved
Know, in their honeyed heaven, that I've
Avenged them?
Or do they dream of blossoms

And generations that can never, now
Happen?  Will the bee queen remember
Whispering
My love to her kinsmen as they dream

And drone in hives unknown, unimagined?
Can friendship sprout from the seeds of
Slaughter?
Or will vengeance spout

From the generations of ants I've just
Wiped out?  The Lady of Swarms
Was silent
When I sought Her aid

And whether she blesses or condemns
I cannot say.

Heaven's Darker Face

Most people imagine heaven
As white, and pure, and full of benign angels;
They forget that devils are just angels
In the dark.  Most people think

Mystics are pure and silent
And calm as frescoed ruins;
They forget that not all Mystics
Are Eastern or Christian.  Some

Are wild and sharp as nettle, dreadful
And unfathomable as any deity;
And a few are as shy as the dark little people
Of Faery.  Most people see myth

As a fancy name for fiction or as
History, lost in a morass; the petty concerns
Of people lost in a blur of ego
Or self-delusion.

But myth is eternal precisely
Because it garbs Truth in mortal threads;
An evolving story that never
Ends or changes, really.

Leader and follower, what has either
To offer but a space to be filled by you
Or another; each dwells alone
In his own dark heaven

Wherein he envisions ever brighter
Sweeter paths to his own damnation.