The late American poet Lucie Brock-Broido wrote, ‘My theory is that a poem is troubled into its making. It’s not like a thing that blooms; it’s a thing that wounds.’

I have been thinking about these words in relation to the discussion we had in our Comfort & Affliction poetry class yesterday about the poems ‘Bees’ by Jean Valentine (1934-2020) and ‘She Had Some Horses’ by Joy Harjo (b. 1951).

I chose to explore these two poems together with the group because I associate them with each other – I didn’t know why. Not until we discussed them. It was instinct. Only after the discussion did I realize how much both poems feel born of wounds, both ‘troubled’ into their making.

On the surface, the poems are wildly different from each other in the most obvious ways. ‘Bees’ is short (ten lines), concise and unadorned, written in uncomplicated and modest sentences. One line simply states these casual words: ‘Another man comes over’. The Harjo poem is longer (45 lines) and expansive, complex, even sprawling. It has an unrestrained quality both in its sometimes wild language and images and long, breathing lines. One single line reads: ‘She had horses who called themselves, “spirit” and kept their voices secret and to themselves.’  

I’d like to write a few words about ‘Bees’ and then post the Harjo poem — after reading it, you can draw your own connections and associations between the two poems.

While almost all of Jean Valentine’s poems come from dreams she almost never mentions in the poem that the narrative is a dream. Dreams are murky especially when you wake up and attempt to describe one. But Valentine distils the dream into translucent, vibrant language – reading her poems is like looking at the varied coloured stones at the bottom of a clear lake. She has said, ‘I’m always working with things that I don’t understand – with the unconscious, the invisible. And trying to find a way to translate it.’

Adrienne Rich also used a lake image in this way to describe Valentine’s work: ‘looking into a Jean Valentine poem is like looking into a lake: you can see your own outline, and the shapes of the upper world, reflected among rocks . . . The known and familiar become one with the mysterious and half-wild, at the place where consciousness and the subliminal meet.’ 

Here is the poem:

Bees 
                  for Sandra McPherson

A man whose arms and shoulders
and hands and face and ears are covered with bees
says, I’ve never known such pain.
Another man comes over
with bees all over his hands—
only bees can get the other bees off.
The first man says again,
I’ve never known such pain.
The second man’s bees begin to pluck
the first grave yellow bees off, one by one.

One participating poet in class yesterday mentioned that the poem felt like a fable. Another said that it seemed to speak psychological truths about suffering: the very thing that is hurting you may be what will heal you. A thorn can remove a thorn. Some poisons can remove poison. And in this dream-poem, bees can remove bees from someone’s body.

The poem ‘Bees’ touches on the mysteries of suffering, empathy, human connection, and healing. The man who is suffering from the bees is saved by another man with bees. Does this suggest that pain can only be truly addressed by another person who experiences that same pain?

In our discussion we marvelled at the clarity of the narrative – a potentially complicated story is condensed and told without confusing the reader. And the unpretentious quality of the language is remarkable – the poem has a modesty to it. Simple basic words fill the poem: ‘arms and shoulders’ and ‘The first man says’ and ‘get the other bees off’. Words like ‘says’ and ‘get’ are dangerously bland yet the poem benefits from them – we trust this ordinary, authentic speaker. There is nothing fancy there.

The mundanity of these words are relaxing and create a sense of trust. I can imagine how in most poetry workshops the choice of those words would not go down well – I can hear someone saying, ‘can you think of fresher language to use?’ But in this case the commonplace language reflects a mature, grounded speaker – no need to show off with impressively unique words (although there will be one such word in the poem’s last line); rather, we have a trusted speaker, a friend, telling us a profound story with a simplicity that mesmerizes– it reminds me of Stanley Kunitz’s words: ‘I dream of an art so transparent you can look through it and see the world.’ When reading ‘Bees’ I forget I am reading a poem – I get lost in it and feel I am just looking at the world.

And then we come to the last line. The use of the words ‘grave’ and ‘yellow’, especially next to each other, took our breath away yesterday. Yellow is not a colour one would associate with ‘grave’. We spoke about how the word ‘yellow’ is honouring the bees, praising them for saving the man by highlighting their bright colour. And the word ‘grave’, so surprising, so mysterious here. Who would ever associate the word grave with bees? ‘Grave’ has connotations with a burial place — death is an undercurrent in the poem. But the word grave is used more obviously I think to emphasize the true weighty significance of the oxymoron: the bees in the world of this poem both cause and remove suffering.

This short poem raises so many questions but one last question I’ll mention is: why are these men with the bees and not women? I don’t have an answer to that but I will point out that the poem is written by a woman and is dedicated to another woman — the writer Sandra McPherson. This giving of words from one woman to another reflects the giving of the bees from one man to another man. Words wound and heal; bees wound and (at least in this poem’s world) heal. Perhaps the poem is respecting the suffering that both sexes experience. And including two men in the poem rather than a man and a woman might suggest that the two men are the same man. Although the poem honours human connection and empathy, perhaps it’s ultimately considering self-healing. It’s asking, how might we, ‘after great pain’ as Emily Dickinson wrote, restore ourselves?

Joy Harjo’s poem ‘She Had Some Horses’ is also an animal poem and raises questions about individual suffering and larger, community suffering, and it also considers oxymorons within suffering.

Here is Harjo’s poem:

She Had Some Horses
                           

          

She had horses who were bodies of sand.

She had horses who were maps drawn of blood.

She had horses who were skins of ocean water.

She had horses who were the blue air of sky.

She had horses who were fur and teeth.

She had horses who were clay and would break.

She had horses who were splintered red cliff.

She had some horses.

 

She had horses with long, pointed breasts.

She had horses with full, brown thighs.

She had horses who laughed too much.

She had horses who threw rocks at glass houses.

She had horses who licked razor blades.

 

She had some horses.

 

She had horses who danced in their mothers’ arms.

She had horses who thought they were the sun and their bodies shone and burned like stars.

She had horses who waltzed nightly on the moon.

She had horses who were much too shy, and kept quiet in stalls of their own making.

 

She had some horses.

 

She had horses who liked Creek Stomp Dance songs.

She had horses who cried in their beer.

She had horses who spit at male queens who made them afraid of themselves.

She had horses who said they weren’t afraid.

She had horses who lied.

She had horses who told the truth, who were stripped bare of their tongues.

 

She had some horses.

 

She had horses who called themselves, “horse.”

She had horses who called themselves, “spirit.” and kept their voices secret and to themselves.

She had horses who had no names.

She had horses who had books of names.

 

She had some horses.

 

She had horses who whispered in the dark, who were afraid to speak.

She had horses who screamed out of fear of the silence, who carried knives to protect themselves from ghosts.

She had horses who waited for destruction.

She had horses who waited for resurrection.

 

She had some horses.

 

She had horses who got down on their knees for any savior.

She had horses who thought their high price had saved them.

She had horses who tried to save her, who climbed in her bed at night and prayed as they raped her.

 

She had some horses.

 

She had some horses she loved.

She had some horses she hated.

These were the same horses.