Poem Of The Week: Hive Mother's Prayer By Rachel Bower

Hive Mother’s Prayer

May the nights bring you pollen
and sun-bright sheets, may the hours

we rocked you still lull you
to sleep, may they offer relief,

may all your nights open with bee-bread
and honey, release you from grief

may they hold tired feet, may your head
remember the warmth of my cheek,

may your nights close in a glimmer
of wings, may your belly keep its heat.

Rachel Bower’s absorbing and profoundly affecting meditation on the sanctity of motherhood in her collection, These Mothers of Gods, is given definition in the short but crystalline beauty of ‘Hive Mother’s Prayer’. Spilling as languidly as honey into the realm of the bee’s bountiful harvest, Bower’s contemplation of maternal love bleeds into the gorgeous brocade of the insect’s lush productivity to suggest an indivisibility of collective instinct: the pollen and ‘bee-bread’ yield a metaphorical conjunction, a happy blending of constructive purposes, whose outcome is a benign and temperate antidote to ecological necrosis.

Framed as a prayer, the narrator’s couplets invoke a sense of harmony, wish upon the child, and the natural world on which he or she will depend, the conviction of peace. Bower’s final lines are achingly beautiful, infused with a delicacy of tone that acts to overwhelm discord, and make of the mother and the bee a laity of the devoted:

‘may your nights close in a glimmer
of wings, may your belly keep its heat.’

‘Hive Mother’s Prayer’ is taken from These Mothers of Gods, published by Fly on the Wall Press (2021), and is reproduced here with the kind permission of the publisher.

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