Unlike honeybees, which survive by huddling together
    in the winter, bumblebees only live from spring to fall,
    leaving only the queen to live through the winter.
    — Chris Hardman’s Ecological Calendar

She nods in her empty banquet hall,
crown heavy on her sleep-heavy head.
They are all gone, the soldiers and midwives,
the blond-bearded boys and fleet, golden girls,
floating tapers that animated summer,
snuffed not by darkness but by cold.

The flowers were sweet, but only a little
less lasting than the burley pollen-
wranglers that hummed and sailed the hot breezes.
Now earth hardens, streams flow to a standstill,
without and within, the castle door stiffens
against white winds that bend the stems low.

In her brain the year dwindles to a dim
star or the ghost of the last dandelion.
Alone in the vast warmth of her sleep,
she preserves in silence a royal Word
that will restart the world’s stopped pulse and
call back that court the wind has blown away.