The Greening of Creatures
You don’t imagine green bees until you spot one landing on the yellow rose; they
might be common, but you’d never heard of them, never considered their metal bodies.
Now that illusion is destroyed, bees no longer monolithically the same to you like the
first time you saw a stick bug as a child or a satellite you at first thought was a star and
then it scooted through space. You think nothing tiny on the face of the earth is
knowable, and nothing above you in space is. All of that is fine and beautiful now that
it’s new.
About the Author: John Brantingham is currently and always thinking about radical wonder. He is a New York State Council on the Arts Grant Recipient for 2024. and he was Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks’ first poet laureate. His work has been in hundreds of magazines and The Best Small Fictions 2016 and 2022. He has twenty-two books of poetry, nonfiction, and fiction. The poems included here were sponsored by a grant from New York Council on the Arts and are about Western New York.
Image Credit: “Photo taken in New Jersey, USA in June 2013. A female Agapostemon virescens bee is pictured on the anthers of an Oputuntia flower” By Muniche – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0 Image courtesy of Wikimedia
As It Ought To Be 
