Happy Birthday to Me

I don’t have very much time this morning, as I am heading over to see my mother today—in good Hobbit tradition, I am giving her a bunch of flowers and a present.

I was also thinking that a blog post is a sort of present, a way I could give all of you a present on my birthday.  This is one of my poems that I’ve always loved (and shouldn’t I love my own poems? Plus, there’s the riff on the Emily Dickinson line…), though it has never managed to find itself published anywhere. Until today. So, Happy Birthday.

Like Emily, She Hears a Buzz               

Maybe I did hear a fly buzz
but I hadn’t died.
I wasn’t dressed in white.
I never said, “I do.”

So if a fly buzzed, what
stopped me from buzzing, too,
zipping right out that window?
I don’t think I was a fly—

I was all in black and gold
like a bee or a queen.
Everyone bowed and buzzed
as I passed by.

—Bethany Reid

Note:  this poem appears in my 2020 chapbook, The Thing with Feathers (Triple No. 10, Ravenna Press).