Mum would put a bit by every week:

the life insurance, the Christmas Club,

and, for my sake, the encyclopaedias,

ten volumes bound in faux-red leather.

Volume 5: the Natural World – Insects.

Acetate sheets took me further, further

as I turned them, turned into the structure

of a bee revealing its essential trinity.

The colours brimmed, the words raptured.

Some I knew: antennae, sting, and abdomen,

but others were new: thorax and glossa –

the ganglia of nerves that stood in for a brain.

I should have stayed at this wonder

but I impressed myself alone with detail;

knowledge of the polysyllabic intricate

provides a species of adolescent mastery,

but not being with. Now, I can anatomise,

delineate the power structures of the hive,

but my daughter, wiggling, feels like them,

thanks them, one-by-one, for their honey.