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    • Emerging Voices
      • Jan 20, 2020
      • 1 min read

    A Blessed Plot

    Updated: Aug 11, 2020

    'In the great bee crisis, it is impossible not to see the metaphor.’

    Boris Johnson


    As usual the flowers were complaining

    About their blooming lot –

    In Winter it was always raining,

    The Summers were too hot,

    The hedge too high;

    The shrubbery and rose-beds needed weeding,

    The edges cutting back,

    The mossy lawn required reseeding,

    The black-flies were too black,

    The soil too dry.


    But nothing bugged these flowers like the spectre

    Of swarms of honey-bees

    Who helped themselves to English nectar

    And never once said please.

    ‘Those striped marauders!’

    ‘It’s time we told the bees that we don’t need ’em!’

    And so they took a poll

    And talked about the blossoming of freedom

    Once they’d won back control

    Of their own borders.


    Next morning when the honey-bees clocked on

    The flowers hid their faces,

    Until the busy bees had gone

    To find more friendly places

    Than this sad grot.

    Which now is left a bolted, blighted spot

    Of rust and smut and weed,

    A wilderness of inky blot,

    A garden gone to seed

    And left to rot.


    Moral


    The earth’s the fruit of all our labours

    While Eve still spins and Adam delves,

    And those who do not like their neighbours

    Must learn to go and fuck themselves.



    Andy Croft

    (from The Sailors of Ulm, Shoestring Press, forthcoming 2020)



    Andy Croft runs the T-junction international poetry festival, the Ripon poetry festival and Smokestack Books (www.smokestack-books.co.uk). His latest collection, The Sailors of Ulm is due from Shoestring Press in March.

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