Honeybee: Poems & Short Prose

By Naomi Shihab Nye

“Nye’s sheer joy in communicating, creativity, and caring shine through.”—Kirkus Reviews

A moving and celebratory poetry collection from Young People’s Poet Laureate and National Book Award Finalist Naomi Shihab Nye. This resonant volume explores the similarities we share with the people around us—family, friends, and complete strangers.

Honey. Beeswax. Pollinate. Hive. Colony. Work. Dance. Communicate. Industrious. Buzz. Sting. Cooperate.

Where would we be without honeybees? Where would we be without one another?

In eighty-two poems and paragraphs (including the renowned Gate A-4), Naomi Shihab Nye alights on the essentials of our time—our loved ones, our dense air, our wars, our memories, our planet—and leaves us feeling curiously sweeter and profoundly soothed.

Includes an introduction by the poet.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Jun 23, 2009
• ISBN: 9780061958441

Naomi Shihab Nye

Naomi Shihab Nye was born in St. Louis, Missouri. Her father was a Palestinian refugee and her mother an American of German and Swiss descent, and she spent her adolescence in both Jerusalem and San Antonio, Texas. She earned her BA from Trinity University in San Antonio. Naomi Shihab Nye describes herself as a “wandering poet.” She has spent more than forty years traveling the country and the world, leading writing workshops and inspiring students of all ages. Naomi Shihab Nye is the author and/or editor of more than thirty books. Her books of poetry for adults and young people include 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East (a finalist for the National Book Award); A Maze Me: Poems for Girls; Voices in the Air: Poems for Listeners; Honeybee (winner of the Arab American Book Award); Cast Away: Poems of Our Time (one of the Washington Post’s best books of 2020); Come with Me: Poems for a Journey; and Everything Comes Next: Collected and New Poems. Her other volumes of poetry include Red Suitcase; Words Under the Words; Fuel; Transfer; You & Yours; Mint Snowball; and The Tiny Journalist. Her collections of essays include Never in a Hurry and I’ll Ask You Three Times, Are You Okay?: Tales of Driving and Being Driven. Naomi Shihab Nye has edited nine acclaimed poetry anthologies, including This Same Sky: Poems from Around the World; The Space Between Our Footsteps: Poems from the Middle East; Time You Let Me In: 25 Poets Under 25; and What Have You Lost? Her picture books include Sitti’s Secrets, illustrated by Nancy Carpenter, and her acclaimed fiction includes Habibi; The Turtle of Oman (winner of the Middle East Book Award) and its sequel, The Turtle of Michigan (honorable mention for the Arab American Book Award). Naomi Shihab Nye has been a Lannan Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a Witter Bynner Fellow (Library of Congress). She has received a Lavan Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, the Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award, the Paterson Poetry Prize, four Pushcart Prizes, the Robert Creeley Award, and "The Betty," from Poets House, for service to poetry, and numerous honors for her children’s literature, including two Jane Addams Children’s Book Awards. In 2011 Nye won the Golden Rose Award given by the New England Poetry Club, the oldest poetry-reading series in the country. Her work has been presented on National Public Radio on A Prairie Home Companion and The Writer’s Almanac. She has been featured on two PBS poetry specials, including The Language of Life with Bill Moyers, and she also appeared on NOW with Bill Moyers. She has been affiliated with the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin for twenty years and served as poetry editor at the Texas Observer for twenty years. In 2019–20 she was the poetry editor for the New York Times Magazine. She is Chancellor Emeritus for the Academy of American Poets and laureate of the 2013 NSK Neustadt Prize for Children’s Literature, and in 2017 the American Library Association presented Naomi Shihab Nye with the 2018 May Hill Arbuthnot Honor Lecture Award. In 2018 the Texas Institute of Letters named her the winner of the Lon Tinkle Award for Lifetime Achievement. She was named the 2019–21 Young People's Poet Laureate by the Poetry Foundation. In 2020 she was awarded the Ivan Sandrof Award for Lifetime Achievement by the National Book Critics Circle. In 2021 she was voted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Naomi Shihab Nye is professor of creative writing-poetry at Texas State University.

Book preview

Introduction

One of my favorite classes in college was a linguistics course called The Nature of Language, in which students studied the language of animals. A few students not in the class made fun of us, mooing when they saw our notebooks. I selected bees as my focus for the semester, and our wonderful professor, Dr. Bates Hoffer, said this was a good choice, since bees are fabulous communicators. Bees can tell each other where the good flowers are—how far away, which direction to fly. They do jazzy dances. They can find their ways back to their own hives even if you try to block or trick them. Bees have memory and specific on-the-job task assignments and 900,000-neuron brains. I buzzed about the campus for a happy semester, researching in farm journals and encyclopedias, writing strange, dramatic papers, hoping to be stung.

What I do not recall studying was the growing industry of migratory beekeeping, in which beekeepers transport their hives long distances for pollination purposes. Maybe it wasn’t happening much yet. The huge almond crop in California, for example, has in recent years been highly dependent on hired bees. You now can read about industrious beekeepers who travel (it’s not easy) the interstates with hundreds of hives in giant trucks. Good thing those bees can communicate. Maybe they’re saying, Where are we now? When’s my time off?

I also don’t recall learning much about bee problems, though bees certainly had experienced struggles in their communities already and could be victimized by everything from funguses to viruses to mites.

During the spring of 2007, bee woes made continual headline news in the United States. Many reports said at least one third of the honeybees in the United States had mysteriously vanished. A grieving South Texas beekeeper was shown slumping sadly in his field of empty hives. Florida and Oklahoma recorded their sorrows. Anderson Cooper did a late-night special on CNN. Honey prices rose. There was lots of speculation about what was happening to bees, but no single answer or remedy.

I collected theories. Were pesticides, or nasty varroa mites, which had swept the bee nation, most responsible? Could it be changing weather conditions or cell phone beams? Obviously the current atmosphere sizzles with more electronic signals than any world of the past . . . I was ready to pitch my cell phone out. Something called colony collapse disorder was often cited as a possibility. Seemed like a parallel for human beings in times of war. War is no blossom.

The ongoing Bee Tragedy Stories remain inconclusive. I called Dr. Hoffer after decades and he agreed it’s a troubling topic. Some people say no big deal—this fits into the cyclic pattern of nature—other insects or species of bees will pollinate where the honeybees leave off. But Dr. May Berenbaum, head of the department of entomology at the University of Illinois, says, Though economists differ in calculating the exact dollar value of honeybee pollination, virtually all estimates (of losses to crops, etc.) range in the billions of dollars. That can’t be good.

So, I’ve been obsessed. This is what happens in life. Something takes over your mind for a while and you see other things through a new filter, in a changed light. I call my friends honeybee now, which I don’t recall doing before. If I see a lone bee hovering in a flower, I wish it well.

As for the busy bee thing, the word busy fell out of my vocabulary more than ten years ago. I haven’t missed it at all. Busy is not a word that helps us. It just makes us feel worse as we are doing all we have to do.

Anyway, why are we rushing around so much? The common phrase I can’t wait has always troubled me. Does it mean you want your life to pass more swiftly? This or that future moment will surely be better than the current moment, right? The moment we are living in may be lovely, but if we can’t wait for some other time, do we miss it? We are honeybees in our own lives. But we forget.

Antonio Machado, the brilliant poet from Spain, dreamed a beehive in his heart could turn even flaws into something tasty. This interests me a lot. One thing becoming another, in the tradition of alchemy . . .

We are trained to work for success, but failures, mistakes, or disasters may lead us in intriguing new directions. As a young man, Rudolf Staffel forgot to sign up early for a painting course in Mexico and was stuck taking the pottery course. His whole life swerved. He became one of the great ceramic artists of the twentieth century.

Tim Duncan, the star of the San Antonio Spurs basketball team, was a swimmer when he was growing up. He practiced all the time. But a hurricane devastated the pool on his home island of St. Croix. It wasn’t his own failure but the pool’s demise which helped lead him to huge success in a different sport.

Are the honeybees cooking something up behind the scenes? How many writers or artists have said they stumbled into their favorite works when something else they were trying to create didn’t succeed?

In Holyoke, Massachusetts, a vintage restaurant called Nick’s Nest has been serving hot dogs, baked beans, potato salad, and popcorn since 1921. The slogan of the restaurant is The Nest of Delicious. When my friend and I saw it one day, as we sped by in the rain on our way to eat in another town, I shouted, Stop! I have to see that place! Look, it’s totally old-fashioned!

She said, I thought we wanted Indian food.

Reviews for Honeybee

[kmarch3 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

my VOYA ratings: 5Q, 3PI think that teens who already like reading poetry will love this book. Naomi Shihab Nye's prose is beautiful, simple, sometimes political and thought-provoking. I love her ideas about slowing down and noticing; isn't it the poet's job to remind us of these things? I got the feeling from reading this book that the author is trying to convey that the world has much wrong with it, but small things can make a difference. I loved her poem "Boathouse (for E.B. White)" especially the last line: "So beautiful and confusing where we are ... still trying to say it." I think this also speaks to adolescence so nicely; the idea that it's okay if at times your life or your world doesn't make much sense. I can see teens really identifying with those ideas.

[ctorm_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

5Q 3PBursting with life and poignant musings, Honeybee is a lovely collection of enchanting poems and short stories. Emotions and evocative images hum amongst the pages and the sweet honeybee becomes the perfect muse for Nye's gorgeous works. Poems like "Bees were Better" are relevant and accessible while her musings create a warm and understanding connection with readers.

[librolindsay · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

It is so weird to feel (almost) nostalgic reading protest poems about the Bush administration.

[zoemcl · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

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[johanna_talbott · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

5Q, 2PI really enjoyed these poems and thought they were quite exceptional (5Q), however, I still had to go with a 2P for popularity because I feel that poetry is a genre that most teens would not generally read, even with prompting from a teacher or librarian, unless they already have an affinity for poetry.

[librarianmaven · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Both the sweetness and sting of the titular creature run through this collection of eighty-two poems and short prose. Ranging from the sorrows of war and hive collapse to the joyful way a book can bring strangers together, Naomi Shihab Nye explores how we are all connected, for better or for worse. She includes a short introduction that gives background on her long-standing interest in bees and her concerns about their ongoing future. Most poems are no more than a page and a half long, with prose sections of about the same length, though many of the poems are dense with meaning and benefit from multiple readings. The book hangs together as a coherent whole, but both poems and prose also stand alone successfully, and could be excerpted without losing effectiveness. Librarians and teachers should be aware that Nye’s personal viewpoints and politics come through very clearly, including on the issue of the ongoing Israeli Palestinian conflict, and that some students will want to discuss these points further. Recommended for public and school library collections.

[junipersun · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I've enjoyed dipping into this book over the last couple months. Nothing earthshaking, but I like the way she thinks. A mix of poems and brief prose, bees figure in enough of the writing to qualify for my category. It seems as if most of the bee images are sandwiched in a section between bookends of world affairs. US agression is a big concern for Nye, the daughter of a Palestinian, and some of her poems address GWBush's actions. A meditation on a broken glass gives us "A president who doesn't do everything he can to stop war should break his own plates and see how it feels...It is hard to drink lemonade without weeping into the glass...that reminds me of nowhere we dreamed of going. (p.92-3)" Tho it is hard to separate out quotes, since you almost need the whole poem to see the relevance of images, I was struck by"Where is the note of justice tucked into history? A billion pounds of wisdom in this lost note (p 107)."Some of her poems come from a Zen base "the crickets...saying, Slow down slow down We told you this long ago but you forgot (p.35)."I like how the titles of some of the poems are really part of the poem.I'll be looking for other writings by Nye.

[lavermeer · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A collection of whimsical, insightful, engaging poetry and short (really short!) fiction, Honeybee blends environmental concerns, issues of religious and ethnic understanding, and themes of presence and living in the moment. Witty, authentic, and accessible — an excellent resource for classrooms and school libraries.

[anokaberry · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

so real, so fine. how about the one about the lion park? reminds me of cynthia rylant's god went to beauty school. even the list of contents is poetry...