Free The Bee Hut by Dorothy Porter

F OREWORD
    Dorothy Porter never went anywhere without a volume of poetry. Whether to the local coffee shop or to Antarctica, a book of poems, and often several, travelled with her. She counted reading poetry among her greatest pleasures and her greatest blessings.
    Her own poetry glows and shimmers with a lifetime of reading and this volume is no exception. All the poems, with the exception of the Freak Songs and a couple of others, were written in the last almost-five years of her life. It was a period of great happiness and satisfaction; the best, according to Dorothy, she had known. She produced a large body of new poetry, including her verse novel El Dorado ; there were her collaborations with musicians Jonathan Mills, Paul Grabowsky and Tim Finn, and her work on the film of The Eternity Man , directed by Julien Temple. She was aware of a new depth to the way she inhabited her days, and often spoke about this. Always captivated by the wonder of existence, in the last years of her life Dot learned to live each moment as it occurred, to linger and dwell. She delighted in the everyday: home, family, friends, work, our cat; and she delighted in our travels, vividly represented in this collection, to Africa, Antarctica, the Great Barrier Reef, Uluru, London and New York. She acknowledged her good fortune several times each day.
    Every few weeks during 2004 when she was undergoing treatment for breast cancer, Dot would spend the weekend with her friend Robert on his farm. She loved the country air, the birds, the quiet, the glimpse of the ocean on the horizon, and she was fascinated by the old hut, not far from the house, which had become home to a colony of bees.
    The bee hut became a metaphor for these last years of her life – overwhelmingly healthy years, I should add. She marvelled at the bees, as she had always marvelled at life, but she was also aware of the danger amid the sweetness and beauty.
    It was not the same, as she writes in one of the poems here, after she was first diagnosed with cancer. But as these poems show, Dorothy Porter saturated every moment with life right up to the end; her last poem, ‘View from 417’, was written in her hospital room on 26 November 2008, two weeks before she died. In The Bee Hut she has left behind a volume of poetry to travel with us through the days and years ahead.
    Andrea Goldsmith

EGYPT
    The most powerful presence
    is absence.
    When the pyramid dissolves
    you will keep
    its shadow. its deep rich space.
    in you.
    Today you are strung,
    shivering, with a haunted history.
    You are singing dying songs
    that hurt. but make you.
    Perhaps in Egypt’s death
    is your salvation.
    Its wailing gods. Its red
    heart of desert. Its river
    flowing like a stinging
    harvest. Cling
    and grow you richly.
    Bless Egypt.
    Bless her passing.

ON READING E.M. FORSTER ’S
GUIDE TO ALEXANDRIA
    â€˜The best way of seeing it is to wander aimlessly about.’
    â€” E.M. F ORSTER
    Imagine a city
    where it’s mostly
    â€˜imagine’
    imagine a city, the story goes,
    where one minute you’re a bride
    in your own wedding procession
    next minute
    the ground coughs and collapses
    engulfing and delivering you
    dusty and astonished
    into the embalmed arms
    of Alexander’s equally astonished
    lost corpse
    lying gilded in a forgotten catacomb
    under the traffic fumes.
    Imagine a city where closeted
    Mummy’s Boy Morgan under Pompey’s Pillar
    feasts on erotic love for the first time
    now imagine a city
    with sexually-healed flâneur Forster
    taking your elbow
    through the seedy Rues
    to light candles, cigarettes and the poet’s best whisky
    with Cavafy
    imagine afterwards
    to wind down from all that smoke, stoicism and intoxicating talk
    you do the Greco-Roman Museum
    and vulnerable still
    you let the tomb terracotta statuettes
    do your head in
    because Morgan calls them
    â€˜the loveliest things in the museum’
    because you’re still unsteady with