I'm actually a donkey!

Floyd's passing reminded me of a book I really liked that I read actually before I kept bees, it just has more resonance nowadays: Lars Gufstasson's The Death of a Beekeeper. It is about a beekeeper who dies of cancer.

(Now that summer is gone you can put aside the light fare and read something a bit less uplifting).

Gufstasson is an interesting and unexpected writer, I have liked most all of his stuff that I've read, like "Elegy for the Old Mexican Woman and Her Dead Child."

I often think of these lines of his, which first led me to his poems. They read a bit differently in the post 9/11 era then they did before:

"Dogs! Hangmen's servants!
Royal torture masters!
Haven't you understood?
You there, heating tongs over a coal fire!
I'm actually a donkey!
With the heart of a donkey and the bray of a donkey!
I never give up!"

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