A Blessed Plot

'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.