I saw a dying bee on the sidewalk

it couldn’t fly and it was limping in circles and figure eights

I remembered how bees communicate in dance

And I wondered if behind the bee’s staggering walk

was a kind of stumbling poetry, some coherent message:

a plea for help, a final wish, a prayer to God

a hasty autobiography written in symbols on the pavement.

Or perhaps the bee had already succumbed to the throes of death

And was babbling such nonsense that

even native speakers of its own kind

would see only madness in these cryptic ambulations

and they would shake their heads, and turn away

with a pained look in their prismatic eyes

because those iridescent wings shone no less bright

for all that they twitched uselessly at its back.

--on campus at UC Riverside