Featured Image above: My photo of, Barbara Roe Hebb’s, sculpture, “Pollen Pals”, at the Geelong Sculptors Inc. Annual Exhibition, 101 Ryrie Street, Geelong, where the theme of the exhibition was, ‘Who’s Your Muse’, and I’m presenting this poem for the writers part of the event, tomorrow afternoon.

Mosquitoes and Bees 

 

I was asked the question, “who’s your muse”

My mind flew into overdrive, now I’ll have to chose

Years ago the answer would have been, my Queen

The lady who was always in my dreams

Living longer than her, altered my life’s mission

Spending time alone, enlightened my vision

Mindful thoughts were constantly buzzing

I’d learnt enough to know, this world’s not humming

 

Nature’s lifeblood, mosquitoes, bees

And the air we breath, sheltered by life giving trees

Are the persecuted convicts of corporate greed

Leaving us, the planet’s custodians, begging on our knees

The bees pollinating wings, have been broken

And purifying forests, have been stolen

It’s time, to dismount the angel’s white ponies

And ask my muse Melpomene, please save earth’s colonies

 

We were called to the forest
And we went down
A wind wind blew warm and eloquent

We were searching for the secrets of the universe
We rounded up demons and forced them
To tell us what it all meant

We tied them to trees
And broke them down, one by one
On a scrap of paper they wrote these words

(And as we read them, the sun broke
Through the trees)

Dread the passage of jesus, for he will not return
Then we headed back to our world
And left the forest behind
Our hearts singing with all the knowledge of love

But somewhere, somehow, we lost the message
Along the way
And when we got home, we bought ourselves a house

And we bought a car that we did not use
And we bought a cage,and two singing birds
And at night we’d sit and listen to the canary song

For we’d both run right out of words
Now the stars they are all angled wrong
And the sun and the moon refuse to burn

But I remember a message
In a demon’s hand

Dread the passage of jesus, for he does not return
He does not return
He does not return

Ivor Steven (c) October 2019