Sweet Buzz

It’s back again, the
soporific burr of bees
hovering in the fruit trees that
makes me want to sleep.

I watch them burrowing inside
spring blossoms. They ignore me
as they take their fill
of pollen. Lately, my
taste for honey has taken over my mind
and I’m dripping with
their sweet buzz.

Kim M. Russell, 30^th April 2026

This Thursday at the dVerse Poets Pub, Grace is our host for Meeting the Bar, with a form first introduced by |De Jackson back in 2016: the Golden Shovel, one that I enjoy writing.

Grace reminds us that “the Golden Shovel is a contemporary poetic form created by Terrance Hayes as a tribute to Gwendolyn Brooks … It invites poets into a creative dialogue with an existing poem – honouring it while creating something entirely new.  This form is in the tradition of the cento, or erasure, but with a lot more flexibility.”

All we have to do is take a line (or lines) from poems we admire; use each word in the line(s) as end words in our poems, keeping the words from the original line in order so that, when finished, we can read down the right margin, and have the original chosen line intact. Grace asks us to give credit to the poet who wrote the line(s) and possibly a link to the original poem,. She says that the new poem does not have to be about the same subject matter, but it can be in a similar vein.

I chose these lines from ‘Bee Mornings’ by Julia Webb (who is also a Norfolk poet), from her poetry collection Bird Sisters:

‘The bees that sleep inside me
fill my mind with buzz.’