1. Bees in a Thunderstorm
By Trisha Barry Copyright 2015
I didn't know
until twenty years later
that they had bought two
of my dad's beehives, golden
honeycomb of honeysuckle,
Georgia mountain flowers and clover -
candy on homemade crusty biscuits.
Mom's friends, their home a Plantation brick
while ours was mountain rock and wood –
both built by the same Earl Barron,
native North Georgia builder
whose talent met its end when he fell
through a floor to the basement below.
The way our lives can turn up
side down in two seconds - my parent's divorce,
the death of our life. And, in the end,
her friends didn't keep those bees -
their anger during thunderstorms,
how abrupt changes in atmospheric
pressure were too much to handle.