At ArtSake headquarters (two office cubicles bedecked in exhibition postcards), we’ve been receiving a number of poems-of-the-day emails from such fine citizens as Mr. Knopf Poetry and Ms. Poets.org, celebrating April as National Poetry Month. And it occurred to us: we’ve encountered so many great poets through our Artist Fellowships Program that it would be a shame not to do some of that Poetry Month-celebrating with poems by some of our past awardees.
Our inaugural poem is Keeping by Patrick Ryan Frank (Poetry Fellow ’06). As bees begin emerging from their winter clusters, this poem of interspecific interaction seemed like a perfect way to celebrate our poetic month.
KEEPING
20,000 Bees Infest Okla. Family’s Home
-THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
It wasn’t at all like everybody thought –
We’d lie in bed on Saturday mornings, watching
Their improbable bodies floating through the light,
As slow and strange as dreams. They didn’t sting;
They didn’t seem to notice us at all,
As each year the house became more fully a hive:
We thought we smelled their honey; we felt the walls
Warmed by the constant pulse of wings deep
In the plaster. It wasn’t difficult to live
In a house that at night would hum us all to sleep.
Patrick Ryan Frank has been awarded the Academy of American Poets College Prize and two Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center Fellowships. He is currently seeking an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin.
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