Marietta Brill created “If Bees” from Anna Botsford Comstock’s How to Keep Bees (1905). Please click here to read.

About the piece and the process of composing it, Marietta Brill writes:

“If Bees” is a series of 12-line poems extracted from How to Keep Bees: A Handbook for Beginners by Anna Botsford Comstock.

I was instantly entranced by the language, as clear-headed and lyrical as a bee. Somehow, this instruction manual was never boring.

The four centos are also ersatz sonnets. The first 10 or 11 lines of each poem begin with “If” or “As if.” I liked the droning repetition. And I liked these conditional fragments to express the fragile uncertainty of our bee population due to climate change, an underlying theme. The 12th and final line of each poem contains “then,” serving as the sonnet’s volta and giving the poem some sense of resolution—which I think is how bees would like it.

I changed some words (but not “if” or “then”) of the original text for continuity.

These poems are adapted from an existing work in progress, a crown of sonnets, also called “If Bees.”

The 12-line poems of “If Bees” reflects our invitation to poets to incorporate 12 (on the occasion of our twelfth volume) in some way in their work.