“When the dinosaurs put on feathers / they began to sing / like the polyphonic chanting / of Tibetan monks, their throats / filled with notes, music spilled / like dark honey into time / Music the colour of soft amber / warm and slightly acrid in the ear / on the tongue / a kind of music that haunts / the threshold spaces / bridges and doorways / movement from egg to nest”

So opens Britton Gildresleeve’s collection, a light-filled elegy to mortality and the evanescent beauty and pain of our world.

A single bee is nothing

Her life of 40 days begins

and ends

in anonymity

 

Fed by her sisters

warmed by the music of wings

she grows from blindness

into light

 

In her mouth the amber

sweetness of summer

a hundred thousand hours 

of flight

— excerpted from “Love like honey”