Honeybee: Poems & Short Prose

Synchronicity is when you are with a company called BuzZen and your favorite poet writes a book called Honeybee. It arrived today and I have spent the day savoring it. "Watch us humans as we enter our rooms,remove our shoes and watches, and stretch out on the bed with a single good book. It's the honey of the mind time. Light shines through our little jars."

Bees Were Better "In college people were always breaking up. We broke up in parking lots, beside fountains. Two people broke up across the table from me at the library. I could not sit at that table again though I did not know them. I studied bees, who were able to convey messages through dancing and could find their ways home to their hives even if someone put up a blockade of sheets and boards and wire. Bees had radar in their wings and brains that humans could barely understand. I wrote a paper proclaiming their brilliance and superiority and revised it at a small cafe featuring wooden hive-shaped honey dippers in silver honeypots on every table." Part of me feels as though I should include a disclaimer when I write about a new book by Naomi, but that is silly -- she is not really my cousin; it just feels that way, having been lucky enough over the years to spend tiny bits of time around her and receive the occasional note that always carries with it a peacefulness like that which I experience upon reading correspondence from Tony, my eldest cousin on my Sicilian side. As I've written previously, Naomi is a fellow Piscian and fellow vegetarian whom I've seen deftly transform a cardboard convention center room into a sacred space with simply a basket of pita, a bowl of hummus, and a book of poetry. I read and admire a lot of poetry for children and adolescents. I am quite often entertained by it and always share it at booktalks -- including some pieces I first read as a child. I find something so special in getting to spend an afternoon reading Naomi's work. HONEYBEE is Naomi's new collection of poetry. Each of the eighty-two poems has a wonderful personal quality; the collection reads as if it is a series of notes in various poetic forms that she has written to the reader. "...My niece in Australia told me that the students in her university class were required to read the blog of an Iraqi citizen and write about it before they could graduate. She chose a girl who is now fifteen writing under the pseudonym Sunshine. I began reading Sunshine's blog too. I love the way she writes about the details of her life-her friends, the books she is reading, her activities and memories. Life is so difficult since the war started, but still she ends her entries with lines like, 'Try not to lose hope.' She wishes she could live the way kids in other countries live, without so much constant violence surrounding them. Sunshine has become my personal hero, drinking deeply out of the moments. So much is passing so fast..." This is a bittersweet collection, as Naomi is clearly feeling the pain -- like so many of us -- that continues to be the product of five years of war and war spending. It is also a collection that repeatedly alludes to bees and to the mysterious and well-publicized disappearance of a lot of honeybees in a very short time: "All the theories about the disappearing bees omit one possibility: they are sick of the word 'busy.' They