It's August, and out my back window
I can see a little girl — seven, maybe —

kissing bees, in her mother's garden.
She laughs wildly after every kiss;

after every kiss she licks her lips
and wipes them on her wrist.

Her mother calls out from the
kitchen window: "Kathleen Elizabeth!

I'm not telling you again! Stop kissing
those bees! You're gonna get stung!"

Kathleen Elizabeth pouts and stares
wantonly at her bees in the blossoms.

She seems enthralled by the buzzing
throng. I wonder if she knows

that, in Brittany, generations believed
the tears of Christ shed on the cross

turned into bees, that according
to Mohammed the bee is the only

creature that God ever spoke to directly,
that according to Herodotus, kings

of Scythia were buried in beeswax.
Maybe she was once chosen,

having lived a former life
in the Far East, where bees are believed

to impart eloquence to a child
of their choice. Maybe she intuits,

somehow, that when Plato, Sophocles,
and Xenophon were infants, bees

alighted on their mouths. She must
know something, because, now,

she is singing to the bees, as people
in England used to do, to keep their bees

at home and happy. And, now, I can hear
the thoughts that incite her desire,

that arrive on the breeze, as the whole
luminous day around her —

and around me — seems to whisper:
"Kiss the bees! Kiss the bees!"