Twilight Time

One bee stepping sideways around
   one ripened cone of an echinacea, burying
its head repeatedly in miniscule florets,
   is the main attraction in the garden tonight
and as such my reward for planting out that bed.

I count from this chair in the shade fifty-two 
   purpurea heads in flower. To one bee.
And it’s bee season. Two more of its kind
   about ten feet away are surveying
and landing, supping, lifting and landing again 

 on buds that have opened since yesterday
  in one of three African Blue basils. 
Last year, my garden diary says, I counted eight
   to nine big bees on each of the three blue basils 
in that bed at about this hour (it’s after six). 

There’s no plague of purple martins, 
   no orchard or meadow nearby more enticing 
than what I’m growing this year for the bees I enjoy
   feeding and watching as a way to wish them well 
for the rest of their short lives. Everywhere 

these days I’m forced to concede, despite not
   caring to, that I may have the bees with me
at the threshold of my personal nonexistence, 
   that already vast-enough catastrophe, 
and with us there as well the earth entire.

First published in an earlier version by the Tor House Foundation.
Chosen by judge Marie Howe for the 2020 Tor House Prize for Poetry
www.torhouse.org