Poems (Forrest)/The shadow of a bee
THE SHADOW OF A BEE
You pride yourself (the way some churchmen do,Following the Book) your duty here is done,Leaving me prone, a crushed and crumpled heapOf penitence! A wilful, foolish child,Feeling the rod that heals her of her shameThat she may live to holiness and turnThe wild life-forces into sacred use.
I saw upon the cold grey chapel-wallThe shadow of a bee. A wedge of sunDrave through the splendours of the yellow glassLeaded about (as custom keeps in fire);The shadow of the bee was twice as largeAs was the bee that darted to the floor,Dreaming a syrup in a waxen dropThe candles spilled. That bee was brown and gold,And smelled, I knew, of heather-tops and grass,And slow, sweet primrose honeys of the hive.Its hairy legs at noon were gripped by flowersIn near embrace, and still it ached of them.
You thought you left me weeping on the stone—My beads laced in my fingers—to repent;A broken, slender, white and woman thingMade for a toy, and never for a coif, Made more for man than God, if God be suchAs you have shown Him, stern, aloof, and blindTo sudden dimples in a bud-pale cheekAnd tiny rose-leaf buttons hidden byThe folded 'kerchief of a satin breast.Belike my heaving shoulders aped a stormOf self-accusing, waking modesty;But underneath my down-dropt lids I sawA tasselled moor the summer whips to bloom;And lovers, to each others' bodies held,Breathing hot gorse and drunken with the sun!