Poetry by Rhys Hughes
END OF DECEMBER
At the end of December
in the year 2023
I wrote this poem about a bee
who held a key
in his little legs, delicately.
He flew to a door in a big tree
and turned the lock
in the trunk
with a dramatic clunk
and I’ll remember
for quite a while
how slender was his smile.
Behind the door
was a cup of tea
brewed especially for me
in a clean teapot
but strained afterwards through
a smelly old sock.
Plus a ginger biscuit like the moon
that took up most
of the room in the gloom
of the tree’s interior,
and I was grateful for these gifts.
“Thankee kindly,” I said to the bee
as I dunked and drunk
from the porcelain cup.
Then unexpectedly he said to me:
“Nothing is free
in this material world. That’ll be
six hundred rupees.
I will take a cheque, pay up now
or by heck there’ll be a mighty row
and you will never
see tomorrow.”
That, to my sorrow, is a true tale
and now I avoid tea
offered to me by bees in a forest.
And it is why
I only accept
cautiously at best
black coffee brewed by butterflies.
LOST LOVE
We parted near the marble fountain
in the twilight of a magic year,
she was a scientist at the university
and said I was too simple for her.
She also said I was far too small
to make the affair feel quite right,
that our love was just a game but I
was an intriguing specimen all the same.
Although I have not seen her since
and indeed I have now lost all hope,
I suspect she nonetheless is watching me
through an electron microscope.
Rhys Hughes has lived in many countries. He graduated as an engineer but currently works as a tutor of mathematics. Since his first book was published in 1995 he has had fifty other books published and his work has been translated into ten languages.
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