Honeybee Innocence
by Odin Roark

Transporting would be routine
The colony waited
Where thousands of fellow creatures
Respectfully deposited their wealth
Their joyful survival

It meant no harm

But the small boy couldn’t hear
After all
Honeybees can’t talk
Can they?

He had trod on the simple life
Now
Running up the hill
There throbbed within the pain
A lesson of love
A bee
A Boy
Never to really understand one another

How could he know
The creature merely reacted
Innocence acted in the dark
The bee was gathering love
Ultimately giving her life to defend

How foreign this experience remained
The boy grew
The man emerged
Discovering stings of the heart
The mind
Far out-pained the innocent bee’s barbed defense

In spite of the years

The experience stayed with him
And far down the road
As in war
Where trodding upon innocent creatures
Became the collateral norm
That one honeybee
That one creature that meant no harm
Remained the death that started a lesson
The first death he couldn’t resolve
The defensive death he dwelled on
The guilt that haunted his PTSD treatment

How simple the experience
How resistant the lesson
Why is that
He wondered