Bee Glue
‘Break a vase,’ says Derek Walcott, ‘and the love
that reassembles the pieces will be stronger than
the love that took its symmetry for granted.’
When I read this I can only think who broke it?
In the British Museum, two black ‘figures’
(they don’t say slaves) beat olives from a tree;
a ‘naked youth’ stoops to gather the fallen
fruit. The freeborn men are elsewhere, safe
behind their porticos, arguing the world’s
true form. They talk of bee glue, used
to seal the hive against attack, later called
propolis, meaning that it has to come
before – is crucial for – the building of a state.
***
Today it’s summer and bees hum inside
the carcase of a split bin-bag. A figure passes,
is close to passed, when I see her face, half
shadow, glazed with sweat or tears, the folds
beneath each downcast eye the same
dark brown as – oceans off – my grandma, Mak.
I want a love that’s unassimilated, sharp
as broken pots. That can’t be taken; granted.
My dad would work among the blue and white
pieces of a Ming vase – his job to get it
passable. He’d gather every part and after days
assembling, filling in (putty, spit, glue),
draw forth – not sweetness – something new.
Bee Glue is carefully crafted. A careless reader might imagine it’s a pair of sonnets. In fact, Will Harris’s sonnets are 13-liners, and the structure of each, in two generally unrhymed, non-metrical quatrains and a quintain, is gently subversive of tradition. Without melodrama, and often registering “breakage” through linguistic filters, the diptych formally recognises the arts of innovative mending. Its last line, revising Samson’s riddle, rhymes to emphasise the importance of the new, and yet connect it with the past.
Derek Walcott’s poetry, tradition-rich and culture-spanning, often embodied such an enterprise, and the opening quotation, slightly paraphrased, is an inspired “pick” from Walcott’s 1992 Nobel lecture: “Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole. The glue that fits the pieces is the sealing of its original shape. It is such a love that reassembles our African and Asiatic fragments, the cracked heirlooms whose restoration shows its white scars. This gathering of broken pieces is the care and pain of the Antilles, and if the pieces are disparate, ill-fitting, they contain more pain than their original sculpture, those icons and sacred vessels taken for granted in their ancestral places.”
Harris alters “fragments” to “pieces”, adding a certain prosaic heft to diction that might, in a poem, sound over-poetic. The italicised question at the end of line four further challenges Walcott’s elevated, restorative tone. Its abruptness grabs the reader’s attention. Harris’s voice is characteristically quiet and subtle. Now, lest we should complacently forget our history, the younger poet’s unspoken question, “who broke it?” recalls the violence of original acts of breakage.
The question is obliquely answered in the second-stanza jump-cut to the “olive-beaters” amphora in the British Museum. The pale, scholarly euphemisms (“figures”, a “naked youth”) are challenged – “they don’t say slaves”. So Harris sets his jar, and his sense of beauty and truth, at an angle to Keats’s festive and serenely appropriated Grecian Urn. His context implies falsehood in the dominant narrative.
Beyond the jar’s workaday rural scene, urban philosophers debate at leisure, safe as bees in the hive. The state’s self-protective powers against invasion are enshrined in the etymology of propolis. Those “freeborn men” discussing “the world’s true form” are ironically treated, and perhaps connected by the poem to the worst sort of fracturing – when one group of humans enslaves another. Social privilege scaffolds such transcendental concepts as Platonic form.
Now the focus shifts to the personal, although figurative cohesion is carefully retained through the transformations of the central images and symbols. Among the urban detritus of split bin-bag and scavenging bees, the passing human figure seems almost ritualistic, in a Grecian Urn sense. “Mak,” Harris explains, “is bahasa Indonesia for ‘mother’, but also just a commonly used endearment to refer to older relatives. I’ve always called my grandma mak (to the extent that I always forget what her actual name is!)” Mak seems to be in mourning, with her glaze of “sweat or tears” and “downcast” eyes. Her anguish elicits a powerful declaration from the grandson, “I want a love that’s unassimilated, sharp / as broken pots.” The cruel edge of the broken piece has become a symbol of value and intensity. Walcott’s paradox recurs: the scattered vessels are more eloquent than those which are safe and whole. Notice how Walcott’s twice-uttered “taken for granted” is brilliantly realigned by a semicolon in the description of the propolis-like love “that can’t be taken; granted”.
In the metaphorical consummation of the last quintain, the speaker’s English father is repairing a Chinese vase. His own modest word, “passable”, conceals meticulous devotion. It’s almost exquisitely appropriate to the craftsman’s realism and scepticism about high culture, commodification and artistic ego. Someone who mends pots knows that substances such as “putty, spit, glue” are essential in holding together the loftiest vase. The poem and the poet need something similarly organic and connective.
Auden wrote that, without a cement of blood, innocent and human, “no secular wall may safely stand”. The imaginative glue in Harris’s sequence is a benign secretion. For the poet, it’s the enabler of integration and innovation. Perhaps it symbolises the hope of a better-connected future for the whole human hive.
Bee Glue first appeared in Harris’s fine debut pamphlet, All This Is Implied. It’s also included, in a slightly earlier version, in Bloodaxe’s recent anthology, Ten: Poets of the New Generation, the third in the ever-illuminating Complete Works series representing black and Asian writers. You may like to catch one of the anthology’s launch events or take part in the all-day Diversity in Poetry conference at Goldsmith’s, University of London on 9 November.
