Or, if you prefer, a short story in free verse.
2nd July 2021
Her grand-daughter, sturdy knickered nymph
Stomping green wellyboots with boggling frog eyes,
Is suddenly back, with the tabby cat,
From their First Look.
Little One arrives beside the kitchen table like an urgent express,
With wafts of lotion and sunshine on air-loving skin,
As if her imagined wheels had scented brakes:
‘Gran, the big bumblebees, and all the other buzzers,
Are blooming well bombing round the flower beds this morning!
I think there’s so much pollen and nectar in all the flowers,
They’re fairly well doing their nuts!
And the orchard, with all that blossom,
Is even more full of bombing bees –
Blooming SQUADRONS of them!’
Then, important afterthought, ‘Any mixing bowls needing licking yet?’
‘Sweetheart, I haven’t decided what to bake yet.’
‘But we were out there quite a long ages!
Or – did I hear your tinger,
That ‘phone thing which makes you rush in from the garden?’
The older nods.
‘Was it ’portant?’
Thinking, It better had have been, on a baking morning!
With shake of head, the grandmother white lies; then brightens,
‘What is important, mia cara, is to know
That bumblebees ought to bomb, because in Italy –’
‘Where you come from.’
‘That’s right, where I come from–’
‘And where I a quarter come from.’
‘Hm-hmm. Anyway, as I was saying: in Italy, the word for a bumblebee is
Bombo.
Which must be from the Latin, because biologists classify bumblebees as
Bombus.
And that is why, we will look it up in the dictionary later,
That is why we have the English word bombulation;
And thus you can say that a bumblebee bom-bu-lates.’
‘Those,’ pronounces the younger with sage relish,
‘Are flipping good vocabulary!’
Gran’s winking smile.
‘So good, I think Hansard and I had better
Fetch my diary to write them down – RIGHT NOW!’
‘Maow’ agrees the cat, who as a very small kitten
Was plucked unobserved by pudgy fingers from a pavement near Parliament,
And thrust deep in a winter coat pocket, where he slept
Until the train home, well into Gloucestershire,
Was rattling through Sapperton Tunnel.
Gran concurs: ‘Yes, do that –
Mia bombula, my little she-bee!’
© Christopher Jessop 2021
