Danielle Hope

Bee sting therapy

uses the venom of bees.
A shot for nerve, tendon or muscle pain
or swelling, cancer, arthritis.

Therapists hold a bee to each cheek
or shroud your chest with bees like a Spartan tunic.
Then let them sting.

It’s said this muddles immune messages,
badgers them into warfare.

Stings hurt.
So for the timid there are milky injection solutions
and skin pastes from Bald-faced Hornets.

But the most effective method is when the venom
comes from a bee that is alive.

And the bees?
Watered by neon, burgled of orchards and wild heath
they hide in hollyhock and snapdragon.

Side effects: sleepiness, itching, low blood pressure,
anxiety, confusion, tight breath, fear, fainting, death.

Mrs Uomo tries out as Pierrot

Most artists have tried on his clothes—
Biancolelli to Björk, Grimaldi to Bowie.
He’s there – tickling Columbine to death,
there – thieving the Harlequin’s white stick
by Cézanne.

Popular for self-portraits—
Modigliani, his left eye vertiginously shut.
After all, some people have dressed
their dogs, cats, rabbits, ferrets,
or Holstein Friesians
as Pierrot.

So why not me?
asks Mrs Uomo, as she dunks her ginger snaps.

She could puff at her long white pipe
like the one she saw Seurat made him blow—
and make sounds like a vain Canada goose
honking as the tide rushes over its feet—

she could practice, like Serebriakova,
outrageously in slacks,
pout like Henrion’s bamboozling  poses   —

she could paint her face,
because Pierrot never wears a mask,
and balance on the edge of the moon
making the forks and spoons magically boogie. 

 

Danielle Hope is a British poet, translator and editor. She has had four books of poetry published, one book of translations (from Italian) and has given many readings both in the UK and abroad. A prize-winning poet, she was a founder member of the Tempest Poetry Group and a trustee of Survivors Poetry to which she still acts as an advisor.  Danielle took over as main editor of the longstanding British poetry magazine Acumen from issue 101.