Most poems about bees ask what the bees give us. Ram Krishna Singh turns the question around: "When flowers have dried / who will feed the bees". Honey is what people usually take, but here the worry is for the bees themselves, left humming in a world that has stopped providing for them. That small reversal sets the poem's tone. It is an elegy, and the thing mourned is a relationship of care that has broken down.
The poem is built as six three-line stanzas with no rhyme and, notably, no punctuation at all. It opens like a question but never gets a question mark, so the question simply hangs in the air, unanswered. The sentence runs on across the stanza breaks, tipping over line endings: "or feel the hands / that tend honeycombs", "they may meet / to recall". The grammar is also slightly loose. "Feel the hands" can be read as the bees sensing the touch of those who tend them, a tiny image of tenderness that makes the later loss feel personal. The lines are short, a few words each, so the poem reads quietly, almost under its breath.
The sound patterns are subtle but deliberate. Listen to the h-sounds: *hum*, *honey*, *hands*, *honeycombs*, *hives'*, and finally *hush*. The poem begins with the buzz of a living hive and ends with the silence that has replaced it, and the repeated breathy consonant carries the reader from one to the other. Elsewhere there are playful echoes: "hymn" sounds like a cousin of "hum", as if the bees' drone were already a kind of sacred song, and "dispel the spell" folds a word back into itself, like a charm trying to undo a charm.
The imagery runs on colour and then drains it away. "Orange groves" and "golden days" suggest warmth, sweetness and sunlight, the whole palette of honey. Against this the poem sets "smoky hush" and "naked trees". Smoke could suggest many things, from a beekeeper's calming smoke to fire or pollution, and the poem refuses to say which. It even admits as much with "or whatever caused", a phrase that shrugs at its own uncertainty. The word "burial" is the starkest choice: hives become graves, and the loss is final rather than temporary.
The middle stanzas are where hope appears, and it is hedged at every step. The bees (or perhaps the people who kept them) "may meet" to "recall the golden days" and "even tune / a new hymn". The modal verb "may" and the little word "even" show how thin this hope is. Imagining a new hymn to dispel the spell is a gentle fantasy, as if grief could be sung away. Then comes the pivot: "but I know". It is the only appearance of a speaker in the whole poem, and it arrives flat and certain: "the bees won't return / to naked trees". The title has already given the ending away, so the poem builds no suspense. Instead we watch hope being politely overruled by knowledge.
"Naked" is the final, quietly powerful word choice. It personifies the trees, making them exposed and stripped, and it explains the bees' absence: they leave because there is nothing left for them to come back to. The poem never lectures. Readers today may hear echoes of anxieties about vanishing pollinators and damaged landscapes, but that is our reading. The poem itself names no culprit and offers no solution.
That restraint is what makes it significant. In under fifty words it moves from a question to a wish to a verdict, and it leaves us with an uncomfortable idea: what we call "nature's gifts" depend on a two-way bond of tending and feeding, and when that bond fails, the silence that follows can't be sung back into sound.