The Bee Maidens of Parnassus: A Mythic Poem

Prophecy Can be Dangerous

Three bee maidens, garmented with translucent wings, rest in the stone honeycombs caves of Parnassus. Their vision-viewing prismed eyes look beyond the the white webbed sky of blue cotton to observe the plodding progress of two drones walking slowly past the lichen grown, tholoi tombs, the stone hives homing the discarded husks of the immemorial myriad maidens.

Eli and Maskra, the village tanners, move towards the endless maidens. Their home has been so weary since their sons were lost to the tithes of the king’s dreary, distant war. They seek the maiden’s prophecy.

How slowly drones move. How they are confined to increment enshrinements.

At last, the drones are cast within the maidens’ multifaceted eyes, and transported within the edge of time’s sphered prophecies. Moments stretching in time, in amber glass, the drones are hesitant.

Honey cloys within their throats and minds. They become fearful of the sting of knowledge, the rituals are incomplete. Their desired incantations of insight wither and die.

The indifferent, endless bee maidens leave the drones. They fly through the air of time, to feed on some other future’s flowers. Returning to their stone shrines with their bodies pollen-powdered with prophecy which will etch onto the stone walls of their honey-comb home.

Eli and Maskra return home in silence. Their minds are reeling with the unwelcome revelation of the maidens’ flawed amber. Maskra sets two places at the table and says her prayers for her soldier sons, glad to be safe in time’s familiar and comforting embrace.

Come midsummer, and all the drones of Parnassus gather clashing cymbals summoning the world’s bees from sunlit meadows and shadow woods. Calling the bees harnessed in wooden hives and the bees wild and free, building paper skins on changing sands. Even the black, dead bees, who groom the luminous fungus within the tholoi answer the call of the Parnassus drones.

Eli and Maska clash their symbols the loudest of all, fearing their moment of desire might draw the slow attention of the goddess to their absent sons. They do not want that luscious, unctuous mind to taste the fate of their lost boys.

The voices of the drones sing in tribute to Artemis and to her bee maidens. In clashing clouds, in the million buzzing insects, Eli and Maskra dance and chant their words of praise, closing their minds against the dangerous voice of epiphany.

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