Bee-Folk or the Good State, 
- Bee-Folk or the Good State, and And in the Beginning There Are Pictures
Bee-Folk or the Good State
It’ll be a morning like this when they come: stateless snow-bees with an enormous craving for everything sweet their thick furs saturated from the icy journey they come over snowy solar-fields mark their paths on the winter sky rock myself close my lids listen to their language of knocks you already hear in the walls and beneath the talk on the radio—they never settle down they bring the honey harvest into specially designed machines let themselves be rented and transported into difficult regions to break strikes and the will of the old sentimental state-bees doomed already by a harsh winter [End Page 43]
And in the Beginning There Are Pictures
they’re on the walls the pictures the photos there of the dead
the dead to the right of the window and the living left and the living no longer becoming but the dead
but the dead are sometimes also pictures of the living that were hung from left to right
or the dead are the living that went through the window from left to right
and before the window stands an apple tree and in the window appears the picture of the apple tree and under the apple tree stands my grandfather
and he lies under the window and dies among the pictures of the dead and under the apple tree stood my grandfather
if I sit among the pictures without knowing the beginning the end [End Page 44]
Daniela Danz is a German poet and novelist. Her poetry includes the volumes Pontus and V, and her most recent novel is Lange Fluchten. She is widely published in German anthologies and journals. Danz lives in Kranichfeld and is head of the Schillerhaus museum in Rudolstadt.
Harry Roddy is a poet, translator, and associate professor of German at the University of South Alabama. He has published scholarship on twentieth-century German literature, as well as translations of the poets Farhad Showghi and Daniela Danz. He lives with his family in Mobile, Alabama.
