Rooftop Apiary at Midnight

On the library roof the hives breathe like accordions, warm cedar boxes humming against satellite dishes, and the city below loosens its tie of headlights, spilling amber threads through rain-slick avenues.

Bees return with pollen dusted the color of apricots, tiny couriers from vacant lots and balcony basil. Their wings write quick silver parenthesis in the air, opening and closing the sentence of dusk.

I lift a frame: hexagons bright as cathedral windows, each cell a small lantern where summer keeps speaking. Honey gathers slowly, like music under a door, like a secret learning the weight of its own name.

When midnight settles, the skyline turns to dark water. The hives keep singing, patient, incandescent. Somewhere inside that golden grammar of wax, morning is being translated, drop by careful drop.