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Apiary 40

By Carol Frost b. 1948 Carol Frost

The humble sense of being alive

under the towering sun

fills the nectary and ripens apricots

down to the last one,

if Mnemosyne wakens from apathy

each moment. It is the soft burly sound

of a bee tumbled in fritillary,

is it not?

But if memory, as if to illustrate

the mind was not yours to have,

the mind was not given,

fails us, leaving us in our underpants

in the garden, should we not

hate the garden,

or the woman whose garden

it is? And sunlight. Thunder.

Rain. Hardened in heart against

what earth compels and seizes,

goddamning, goddamned rain.

Source: Poetry (March 2009).

Biography

Carol Frost was born in 1948 in Lowell, Massachusetts. She studied at the Sorbonne and earned degrees from the State University of Oneonta and Syracuse University. The author of numerous collections of poetry, including Honeycomb: Poems (2010), The Queen’s Desertion (2006), I Will Say Beauty (2003), Love and Scorn: New and Selected Poems (2000), and the chapbook The Salt Lesson (1976), she has received grants from the National . . .

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