The ritual of Bugonia was an ancient Mediterranean practice and belief that bees could be born from the carcass of a bull. It symbolized emergence, and the cycle of death and life.
The tiny cyclamen of my heart still beats
beneath a dirty tunic
and tattered corn husk dolls.
You’ll sympathize with my cracked feet and blisters
when each person you call an insect dies–
because you were a girl once too. Sympathy came gently.
You’d run through fields of grass, poisoning each blade. You were young,
deserted in the fur of rats. Now you are just
blackened resentment in its truest form. Breaths blend
into the nothing from Gaza's shared lungs.
We have fallen into the trench of neglect,
as sickness worms its way into our vessels;
your fleas into our food.
You have infected my brother too.
He is only six, yet you deglove him
of his peace. Take him whole, I say!
End his suffering, dear Death;
reach your ill, black fingers down his throat
so that he may cough up this abhorrent ailment.
Reach them down mine too. Free me of these rotting toes,
our ritual of bugonia– I the bull, you the infection.
The bee, a symbol of death for our poor silken road.
