Al Noor Mosque and Linwood Mosque terrorist attack, Christchurch, 15 March 2019 along the police cordon, outside the mosques, outside while the sun is in the autumn sky the bees go from flower to flower, collecting pollen they will include these flowers in their waggle dance so that all the bees in their hive will know, and they collect the pollen and the nectar because this is their nature once my fascial stretch therapist said to me But there isn’t really racism in New Zealand though as she shifted my leg further over her shoulder and I told her, yes, yes there is and she screwed up her forehead and said No, but not really and I don’t think I need to tell you what colour she is and that I was too tired to argue the point (as you can tell that I am middle-class and Pākehā by the fact that I have a fascial stretch therapist despite not being an athlete) a single bee can carry 100mg of nectar in its stomach in a single trip although the average load is 20 to 40mg to make a kilogram of nectar that bee will need to make up to 50,000 trips or 50,000 bees will need to make one trip each if a bee is carrying pollen rather than nectar she can carry half her own body weight in pollen last night while I slept heavy and restless ten road workers, including a man named Jay Waaka who looks so very tired, shifted thousands of flowers from the cordon to the side of the road, to allow vehicles access to the mosque, layering the bunches thick on the footpath and they placed each bunch of flowers upright so that the flowers could see the sun so that the bees could see the flowers bees have an open circulatory system, so their hearts are tubes leaking blood into their bodies within seven weeks these bees will have reached the end of their lifespans and by then their waggle dance will no longer include these flowers a poem feels like a silly, pointless thing to do, not when compared to collecting nectar and pollen, so I go outside and watch the bees sipping on the yellow flowers in my lawn, small flowers that I don’t know the name of, and hope they make something good

Poets Resist is published by Glass Poetry Press.
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