poetry

a torso of thorax muscles contract, pulse and propel into lavandula land

      hover               humming horizontally             in a vortex of air

over floral-rich soft spikes

a thrill-buzz
vibrates this black-brown body

banded by metallic-blue stripes like a fur-woven bodice

honing in on one flower head

zooming

vertically

into its nectary

out lengthens the proboscis                                                                      sipping sugary juice
hind legs sticky with pollen-gathering                                          pushes food into the back basket
a grocery bag to haul home for the nursery in her nest                           a single mother’s village
a broody ballerina bending beautiful                   flexing antennae to sense all in one pirouette

listening            smelling              scanning the garden                    left and right and around

over there          Hibbertia scanden yellow flowers snake and scramble around the rockery
she whizzes into that zone                to buzz-pollinate with such force that the pollen

shoots out
of this golden native nectary

Caterina Mastroianni is an Italian-born Australian poet and educator who grew up in Port Kembla and Wollongong, on the land of the Wadi Wadi people of the Dharawal nation. She has published poetry in various literary magazines and four Australian anthologies, most recently in the Live Encounters Poetry and Writing Journal and in the Poetry for the Planet: An Anthology of Imagined Futures anthology by Litoria Press. Her work also appears internationally on the Medium platform. She lives in Sydney on the land of the Cadigal and Wangal people of the Eora nation with Mike, a collage artist and art technician and her cat, Savvy.