A Country of Bees
Poetry by Brylle Tabora
For most of our lives
we have lived outside of our country. We burn books that would remind us of home, receipts that served
as proof we had stayed there.
Soon, we would have to forget
the ways in which we had lived there: the way we talked or acted or spoke. We would assume different names, one for each country we’ve been to.
Benjamin. Fleur. Ruth. Jamal.
There is no point in explaining now.
No one would listen to us if we told them what we did back in our country:
how as children we tended bees
in keeping with the beekeeper’s business.
On the day we said there would be no going back, we heard a swarm of bees outside our house
and since then it has kept us awake at night.
We shall learn this act of forgetting as part of our daily contrition.
We shall believe in the penance for the child who would never know his grandfather, penance for the mother who cried
every night, and penance for the cousin who died mysteriously.
And if these were not enough, we would also teach ourselves
to walk on water and kiss it on its skin, the way children back home did
on the hands of older relatives.
We shall wait for the day the river would take a different course and take its last breath: our final recourse.
This would all be done in a day’s work.
We will seek a place in the comfort
of our beds and lie down with one eye open. As the night begins to wear on,
the child on my lap drifts into sleep,
dreaming of our country,
dreaming of bees.
Brylle Tabora is a poet who lives in the Philippines. “A Country of Bees” will be featured in the forthcoming anthology of Filipino ecopoetry, Sustaining the Archipelago, edited by Rina Garcia Chua.
