To an Exterminator — Blackbird Archive

← v12n1, Spring 2013

Because civilization is always

a retort to another’s guts—

Remove the hive. It is in

the wrong place, nestled and humming

as if error could become a home.

It needs your corrective violence.

For the hive attached to neglect,

built up in a lax, sodden spring

in which no one was looking. Come topple

its walls, knock its symmetry’s

struts. There are ways

to make disaster a part of our world.

(If the hive let us know it was coming.

If the hive had foreshadowed regret.

If the hive had not such dripping valor

that destroyed what it met.) We need morning

swept free, as the drones clear the hive

of a hive’s fine, antennaed

debris. Knock the posts

of its progress to dirt so we see what exists

now does not. Craft a lock

for the mind. Leave no sign

of vacancy.

Lisa Williams

Lisa Williams is the author of two collections of poetry, Woman Reading to the Sea (W.W. Norton & Co., 2008), which won the 2007 Barnard Women Poets Prize; and The Hammered Dulcimer (Utah State University Press, 1998), which won the 1998 May Swenson Poetry Award. Her poems have been published or are forthcoming in Poetry , Image , Measure , Poetry Daily , Verse Daily , and other magazines, and in anthologies including Bright Wings: An Illustrated Anthology of Poems About Birds (Columbia University Press, 2010), The Best American Poetry 2009 (Scribner Poetry, 2009), and American Poetry: Next Generation (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2000). Her essays on contemporary women poets have appeared in The Hollins Critic , The Cincinnati Review , and Poetry Daily . She is the recipient of a 2011 Brown Foundation Fellowship, a 2010 Al Smith Individual Artist Fellowship, and a 2004 Rome Prize. Williams is an associate professor of English at Centre College. Photo by Philip White, 2012