Cafe Writers Open Poetry Competition 2010

Commended   

What We Thought We Knew 

by Jenny Lewis

Once we might have believed, like Pliny the Elder did, that honey
comes out of the air and is chiefly formed at the rising of the stars.
There is no honey, said Aristotle, before the rising of the Pleiades
just before dawn: once just before dawn we had that sense of honey

rising, stars flowed wordless through our bloodstreams, we imagined
we would take our place among the Pleiades – figures chalked against
the sky, the great lovers, star crossed: but space between us condensed
then flew apart until we could no longer touch skin through heaven’s  

architraves while species died in their thousands and what we thought
we knew also faced extinction; once someone somewhere built an ark
but forgot to tell the animals so the last Bouvier’s red colobus, the last

Puerto Rican tree frog, the last gold Martinique Parrot which all ought
to have been saved instead became faint watermarks orbiting the dark
with soot-ringed eyes watching dancing bees become a thing of the past.