The Bee Garden
isn’t much more than my heart laid out. Look, like a dressmaker’s pattern, paper pinned to cloth open on the decking, little pots of sunflowers, tulips, honeysuckles the sundial and an upturned urn of water stuck to it, four chambers and a map. The bees, so full of industry, move in the sudden blossoming of sunlight, the septum like a formal plot, the muscle red and sepals, pollen. If you count its beats there are twenty every fifteen seconds. The heart now hums. Remember the man they paid to shift the swarm, how in the blistering heat he coaxed the queen from the orange tree in his old coat, one foot at an angle, his hand steady and his breath calm as he balanced on the loaned stepladder? I saw the vein in his neck aflame and wondered at this gentleness. Now the sky is a blue box and my hands smell of bay leaf and clover and thyme. Here is my garden, my heart, overwhelmed by spring and its pulse, the light now brimming & spilling.
Deryn Rees-Jones is a poet, editor and critic. She has written extensively about twentieth-century women’s poetry, and her landmark anthology Modern Women Poets was published in tandem with her critical work Consorting with Angels (Bloodaxe, 2005). She has received various awards for her own poetry, including an Eric Gregory and Cholmondeley award. Burying the Wren and Erato were shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. Paula Rego: The Art of Story (2019) is a full-length study of the artist. She is editor of the Pavilion Poetry list and is a Professor of Poetry at the University of Liverpool. Hôtel Amour, her most recent collection, is out in July 2025.
