Keep your fingers crossed for formatting!

It's poetry time! I only hope the formatting publishes correctly. Read it aloud, slowly, for the best reading. Enjoy!

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Every year I ask
why    why    why
A bee droning by
A nectarless flower

Seven years
bzzz    bzzz    bzzz
unflagging pain
from the un-healed wound

Still I ask
why him?    why me?    why any of us?
questions without answers
the bitter stinging never stops

The bee keeps flying
bzzz    bzzz    bzzz
no relief for tired wings
no pollen    no nectar    no honeycomb hive

No blossom smells sweet
why    why    why
seven starving years
have made the flowers vanish

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Okay, so not a happy poem. It is also a title-less poem. I've got it marked in my files as "me as a bee" but, while somewhat accurate, that doesn't really convey the right tone...

I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out. I didn't start out having to trim a lot of excess, but I still shaped it a lot from its first draft. I had a lot of fun messing with formatting, too, figuring out how much space I needed to make the right amount of emphasis. I'm always tempted to edit a piece to death, especially when it comes to poetry, but I didn't find that this piece needed a lot of big changes. It needed tiny changes instead.

I like that sort of finicky, precise detailed work, partly because it is challenging to make each word count, and partly because it doesn't let me lose my focus--I don't drown myself in a flood of words and ideas like I tend to do when writing fiction.

Some other time, I'm going to have a monologue on my ideas about poetry, fiction, and writing in general...

Later!