Free Honeybee by Naomi Shihab Nye Page B

and honeybees?)
    Dee’s correspondents in far-flung little towns like Rosebud and Rockdale, Texas, replied that they were lucky still to have lightning bugs, but people in cities were all missing them. They remembered droves and crowds of them, the great American sport of capturinglightning bugs in jars with holes punctured in the lids and letting them go again. I wrote that the first time our son saw a lightning bug, when he was about six, in the Texas hill country, he insisted it was carrying a small kerosene lantern.
    Here’s a hope that we don’t lose any more of the small things that blink in our darkness. Albert Einstein allegedly said, “If all the honeybees disappear, human beings have four years left on earth.” We’d better increase our levels of attention.
    Facts about insects and animals feel refreshing these days, when human beings are deeply in need of simple words like “kindness” and “communicate” and “bridge.” Turtle organs do not deteriorate as a turtle ages. A shrimp’s heart is in its head. Our cat just said, “Outside” and meant it, as a squirrel, swinging upside down from the bird feeder beyond the window, announced he is really a bird in disguise.

Someone You Will Not Meet
    Rolls her socks into balls,
    lines them in a shoebox.
    Sharpens a yellow pencil
    carefully checking the point.
    There used to be plenty of pencils.
    Stares into a mirror thinking fat nose, fat nose.
    Pins a green bow to her head,
    plucks it off again.
    Worries about loud noises.
    Wraps presents in the same crumpled paper
    over and over again for members
    of her own family.
    Gives her brother an orange because
    he likes them more than she does.
    He complains, I am sick of this life.
    She fusses at him, Don’t say that.
    Gives her mother a handwritten booklet
    made of folded papers called
    One Apartment.
    The people she loves most are in it.
    The uncles who come and go are in it.
    Lucky ducks.
    They are afraid every time they go
    but they brave it.
    A few cats and plants and rugs are in it,
    square television set with a scrappy picture,
    and the streams of bees swooping
    to the jasmine vine
    right outside the window.
    They dip into blossoms and fly away.
    Never could she have imagined being jealous
    of a bee.
    She listens to the radio say there will be
    more fighting
    though no one she knows likes fighting.
    Does anyone feel happy after fighting?
    It’s a mystery.
    She chews on a sesame cookie
    very very slowly.
    Staring at the sesame seeds
    she could almost give them
    names.

A Stone So Big You Could Live in It
    It happens in the woods
    A laugh just pops out
    It happens with a stone so big you could live in it
    Round mounds of soil and stone
    Perfectly dressed in radiant moss
    Blaze of bees around a single blooming branch
    Path so quiet one foot answers the other
    Charred ashes by Jericho Bay
    Blue dots on trees lining the trail
    Sudden sweetness of it
    Someone was here before you
    Didn’t want you to get lost
    Thank you
    Someone
    Thank you
    Blue

Museum
    I was 17, my family had just moved to San Antonio. A local magazine featured an alluring article about a museum called the McNay, an old mansion once the home of an eccentric many-times-married watercolorist named Marian Koogler McNay. She had deeded it to the community to become a museum upon her death. I asked my friend Sally, who drove a cute little convertible and had moved to Texas a year before we did, if she wanted to go there. Sally said, “Sure.” She was a good friend that way. We had made up a few words in our own language and could dissolve into laughter just by saying them. Our mothers thought we were a bit odd. On a sunny Saturday afternoon, we drove over to Broadway. Sally asked, “Do you have the address of this place?” “No,” I said, “just drive very slowly and I’ll recognize it, there was a picture in the magazine.” I peered in both directions and