Before The Bees Died

For years and years children rode bicycles
on subdivision roads, past houses while
mothers had book clubs, fathers played in soccer leagues,
and teenage brothers smoked pot in the basement.

We kept up with old friends,
split checks in restaurants,
and threw dinner parties where
we drank wine and ate pesto.

For years we went to therapists.
We went to grad school.
We drove fuel efficient cars
and watched Netflix on the weekends.

Dogs ran around in our backyards.
There were squirrels and birds and trees.

We had dishwashers, washing machines,
sprinklers. We had portable devices- handheld
electronic satellite catchers that gave us
music, that talked to us, that told us where to go
when we were lost.

We immunized our children,
made them eat farmer’s market vegetables and
assumed they would live better, stronger, longer,
that they too would go to therapists
and grad school.

In the summer mothers drank iced non fat
double shot lattes on café sidewalks,
discussed their divorces, their pilates classes
that great new place on 4th street.

In the fall fathers took the kids camping,
put up internet dating ads
and started sleeping with 24-year-olds.

In the spring the sun was hot on our arms,
everywhere new babies were born
and there were flowers.

Season after season. It was perpetual.

If a bee lay dead on a windowsill,
it was scooped up with a paper towel
and thrown into the garbage with the junk mail.
No one even noticed.