Honeybee Lesson

Transporting would be routine.

The colony waited where thousands
of fellow creatures respectfully deposited their wealth,
their continuing survival.

He meant no harm,
but the small boy couldn’t hear their plea.
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 confusing lesson of love,
where a bee and a young boy
never really communicated to one another.

How could he know?

The creature merely reacted,
innocence acting from a protective instinct
a bee gathering love,
caught expectantly to defend,
ultimately giving its life to shield the family.

How foreign this experience remained.

The boy grew.

The man emerged.
Off to war where discovering stings of the heart,
battered the mind with the injury of battle fatigue,
pushing him beyond the innocent bee’s barbed defense.

In spite of the years,
the experience stayed with him,
reaching down the road of humanity’s continuing war,
where to trod upon innocent creatures
became but the collateral norm.

That one honeybee,
that one creature that meant no harm,
remained a death that remained a lesson,
the first death he couldn’t resolve,
the defensive death he dwelled on,
becoming the reflective guilt that haunted his PTSD treatment.

Beneath his struggle,
he thought often of that boyhood experience.

How neglected such a simple lesson is in man’s war.
Why is that, he wondered.