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.
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.