To a Smaller World Within This One

To a Smaller World Within This One

Karen An-hwei Lee

For several weeks in the late summer, we tossed our masks
and laughed in the night, drove north to the place of strong trees,
bolder than ever, more loving than before, washed in the delight
of meeting face to face, sharing a table. And now, yet again,
we must love one another at a distance, closing the lonely gap
between our hearts. As the world starts to open to the rumbling
routines of people, it starts to close its doors. We are bumblebees
caught inside a squash blossom folding at night, its dressy petals
pressed in a chamber of lesser air. We can still breathe
through our spiracles in our abdomens, our blood organs
bathed in hemolymph, alive even in this swaying world
tucked into the other smaller world again. And as bumblebees,
our prayers murmur or hum the ancient blessing,
the refined, perfumed anointing, the oil of gladness
and garment of praise instead of a spirit of despair
without the blissful levity of bumblebees, whose wings
bear a burden greater than one they otherwise might—
a body of errancy is the only human tender, this fallenness.
In this smaller world, we praise God for essential things.
We wonder, in the late solstice, when the smaller world
will open its vault of unbounded light—as the wild bumblebees,
in a day or so, will change to ash from the furious wildfires,
and if not, their own mortality will drop to the earth
as we who are human must live, breathe, and move
without knowing our appointed day.

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Karen An-hwei Lee
Poet & Professor

Karen is Provost and Professor of English at Wheaton College. Her new poetry collection Duress is soon to appear as part of the Poiema Poetry Series from Cascade Books.

Photography by Wendy Wei