The Bee

by Evelyn Hooven (October 2024)

Not that her love was denied us.
There it was tinged
With disappointment
It was once quietly
If spoke at all—
Her wish to be mother of a celebrity
Without it, deprived, owed.
I couldn’t then question
Such entitlement―
Where is it written?
By what right?
–
Light came from one
Remotest from fame—
Emily Dickinson’s
“Fame is a bee.
It has a buzz
It has a sting
Ah, too, it has a wing.”
–
More light—later:
No compliant offspring
No one at all
Can be your wing supplier.
Fame’s least requited author
Was propelled her whole life
By wings all her own.

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Evelyn Hooven graduated from Mount Holyoke College and received her M.A. from Yale University, where she also studied at The Yale School of Drama. A member of the Dramatists’ Guild, she has had presentations of her verse dramas at several theatrical venues, including The Maxwell Anderson Playwrights Series in Greenwich, CT (after a state-wide competition) and The Poet’s Theatre in Cambridge, MA (result of a national competition). Her poems and translations from the French and Spanish have appeared in Parnassus: Poetry in Review, ART TIMES, Chelsea, The Literary Review, THE SHOp: A Magazine of Poetry (in Ireland), The Tribeca Poetry Review, Vallum (in Montreal), and other journals, and her literary criticism in Oxford University’s Essays in Criticism.

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