What the Beekeeper Knows

She lifts the frame like a page from a burning book, ten thousand small devotions still in motion, the hive's low hum a vowel held too long in the throat.

She learned it from her mother, who learned it from drought— how loss is also a kind of architecture, how the empty comb still holds the shape of sweetness.

The smoke coaxes them into a gentleness they did not know they had. She breathes through it. She always has.

Come autumn the queen will slow, the cluster will tighten around her warmth like memory pulled inward, core of a winter star.

The beekeeper seals the hive with cloth before the frost. She does not say goodbye. She says hush now, hush, I'll be back when the clover comes.