Sean Borodale
12TH NOVEMBER: WINTER HONEY
12TH NOVEMBER: WINTER HONEY
To be honest, this is dark stuff; mud, tang
of bitter battery-tasting honey. The woods are in it.
Rot, decayed conglomerates, old garlic leaf, tongue
wretched
by dead tastes, stubborn crystal, like rock. Ingredients:
ivy, sweat, testosterone, the blood of mites. Something
human
in this flavour surely.
Has all the clamber, twist and grip
of light-starved roots, and beetle borehole dust.
Deciduous flare of dead leaf,
bright lights leached out like gypsum almost, alabaster
ghost.
Do not think this unkind, the effect is slow
and salty in the mouth. A body's widow in her dying year.
It is bleak with taste and like meat, gamey.
This is the offal of the flowers' nectar.
The sleep of ancient insects runs on this.
Giant's Causeway hexagons we smeared on buttered toast
or just the pellets gouged straight from wax to mouth.
Try this addiction:
compounds of starched cold, lichen-grey light. What else seeps
out?
Much work, one bee, ten thousand flowers a day
to make three teaspoons-worth of this
disconcerting
solid broth
of forest flora full of fox. Immune to wood shade now.
