Apiary for Satellites

At dusk the technicians open the roof of the observatory. From black hives, small drones rise, striped with copper pollen. They circle the dish like prayers that forgot the church. Winter light shivers on their wings, thin as radio ice.

Each bee carries dust from dead comets in velvet sacks. They press it into the garden of antennas, cell by cell. By midnight the metal blooms with unheard frequencies, and the mountain hears oceans moving on other planets.

I stand in my suit smelling of smoke and engine oil, listening to their labor stitch a map through the dark. No queen, only a pulse timed to the spinning earth, a low golden hum under the frost of stars.

By dawn the swarm returns, heavy with borrowed sky. We seal the hives; the dishes cool to ordinary silver. Still, my gloves glitter for hours in the sink, as if morning were honey poured from a distant moon.