Wednesday Words: Winter, Lack

Today, another poem from Nick Flynn's wonderful, haunting Blind Huber. The collection hums strong of queens and blindness and thick, capped wax.

Statuary

Our dying does not fill the hive
with the stench
of dying, our bodies
powder, our bodies
the vessel & the vessel
empties.
Outside
the world hungers.
A cockroach, stung,
can be removed.
A careless child
forced a snail inside with a stick once.
We waxed over the orifice of its shell
sealing the creature in. And here,
the celler of the comb,
a mouse,
driven in by winter & lack.
Its pawing woke us.
Even twitching it reeked--worse
the moment it stopped.
Now every day
we crawl over it
to pass outside,
the wax form of what was
staring out, its airless sleep,
the mouse we built to warn the rest from us.