Towing the Queen Mary

How do you tell a great actress
she’s got it wrong? After all, she was
knocking it out of the park when I was
still in school, beautiful and brash yet
innocent in her youth, sharp and
subtle in maturity and always
on time, off book, a perfect pro.
Nevertheless, today she was skating, and on
my thin ice, since no one would blame her for an
off day, but I was supposed to be
directing her.

“Are you sure, Steve?” she would ask after each
gentle nudge, as I felt like a tug
towing the Queen Mary out of an
extremely tight dock until suddenly she
grasped exactly what I wanted and,
under her own power, left safe harbour
out onto the fathomless
ocean of her art.

                                                                                         © Steve Finn

“….bitten by a dead bee”

I don’t suppose he will be missed,
the bee I found dying on the
garden slabs.

I doubt there’s anyone
counting them out and back again
in the hive.

And does death mean anything to creatures
so small? In nature, after all, death is so
commonplace.

Still, it crawls—perhaps searching for that
out-of-the-way place the living seem to
seek to die, for

only the snails, whose trails end in
sudden corpses, carry on their backs their
own cairns.

                                                                                     © Steve Finn