Who Killed the Honeybees?

by Ingrid Bruck

grass no longer hums
flowers don’t buzz
and you stop looking down
when you walk barefoot in clover

the sting of silence

each third mouthful of food
depends on bees for pollination,
they sustain the food chain
and are dying

the sting of silence

when bees starve for lack of flowers
or get lost going home and vanish,
when thirty countries ban American food
and GMOs enter our DNA

the sting of silence

when bees rain down in a parking lot at Walmart,
red wing blackbirds fall from the sky on highways,
and a million fish die in the Arkansas River,
when captive dolphins and whales turn killers

the sting of silence

half the world’s animals have perished since the 70s,
six gulls in a flock, instead of wheeling hundreds,
when only one Monarch visits your garden in a  year
and few bats rake insects on the currents of night

the sting of silence

oceans turn to deserts, fishermen left jobless,
acid rain drains life out of lakes and rivers.
only a quarter of the frogs are left
to croak a night song of coming death

kill-offs, die-offs, honeybees vanished

the sting