While sitting under the cover of my back porch during a rainstorm, I notice a bee on the armrest of my chair.
I shoo it away, and it flies—awkwardly—into a gust of rain.
It flies so awkwardly that it falls to the floor of the porch, before awkwardly flying away again.
The bee’s flight inspires a line in the poem that I’m writing.
And then I think:
“That bee caused an effect that it isn’t capable of understanding. Without that bee’s flight, this poem would have been different, and the experiences of those who will read this poem would have been different, too. And all of these effects occur above the horizon of the bee’s mind.”
But then, as if wishing to prove its superiority to human beings (at least in one respect), the bee flew to a daisy, attracted by its ultraviolet bloom.
A daisy appears white to us because our eyes cannot see ultraviolet.
We are color blind to ultraviolet like a dog is color blind to red.
But a bee can see ultraviolet, a color beyond the horizon of a human being’s perception.
* Orlando Bartro is the author of Toward Two Words, a comical & surreal novel about a man who finds yet another woman he never knew, usually available at Amazon for $4.91.
https://www.amazon.com/Toward-Two-Words-Orlando-Bartro/dp/0998007501/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1462224367&sr=8-1&keywords=Toward+Two+Words