Hold Harmless

by Mirande Bissell

 


Two boys kill half a million honeybees 
outside of Sioux City just after Christmas, 
the hives smashed, the dead bees clustered 
in the snow, and people weep over lost honey 
and enterprise, but my heart is occupied already:
a black and white photo of two boys killed 
by Soviet partisans at Seitajärvi in July, maybe 
six or seven years old, barefoot, their hair 
cut short giving them the look of cancer patients, 
laid in the dry haygrass, their knees bent up, 
but softly, their faces averted, their bodies 
not yet vacated in the motherly summerair.

 


Bissell photo.jpg

Mirande Bissell is a teacher in Baltimore, Maryland, and a recent graduate of Bennington College's MFA. Her first collection of poems will be published in 2021. 

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