2026 Winner, John & Eileen Allman Prize for Poetry

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Maybe they knew before we did. Maybe they felt it. When the line flattened. The air static. Maybe grief hums at a pitch only bees can hear. You’re supposed to tell them—good news and bad. Everything that leaves a mark. That’s what I was told. Or maybe what we needed to believe. So I went to the hive, this time to whisper your name. Everything appeared intact—until I noticed the tilt. Had a branch fallen while we were gone? Had the neighbors dragged it away before we could see? Maybe something hungry came in the night—too eager for sweetness to notice what it toppled. In my youth, the hive stood upright—weathered, a quiet monument. Now it lay horizontal, soaked in the cold March mud. I thought the bees would flee. But softly, persistently, I heard their hum. They hadn’t gone. They kept working, slipping through the splintered wood, lifting their bodies as if to say: we’re here, it’s okay, come home—buzzing the same paths they’d always followed, as if the route was written into their wings. As if grief couldn’t touch their knowing. But maybe grief moves the hive, not the bees. The path’s still there, but it leads nowhere now. Or maybe they already knew. Or maybe they were waiting for me to say it out loud so they could finally fly away, pollen-thick and bitter. I watched them and thought: maybe they felt it before we did. Maybe it was the knowing that pulled them to the earth—tipped from the weight of it. The stillness. That awful silence after the rhythm stops. No. So there I stood, rooted like the old maple that shades their box, thinking, knowing: I should say something. I should do it right. It has fallen to me to tell the bees. I should speak. Whisper his name, the loudest sound in the world. But I couldn’t. Not that day. I just let them carry on. Working—a living hum in the wreckage.