Second Coming No. 166 — July 4, 2025

A poem-a-day protest against the threat posed to our democracy by the current occupant of the White House and his regime

Ed Madden
In the as if

I was telling my friend Shannon
about the new bee boxes
my husband bought at an auction—

we hope to have bees next spring.

I said how weird it felt to be
planning this, to be talking
about planning the new hive

and honey to share with friends

when we aren’t sure we’ll be
here at all, given how things
are going, the daily barrage of news.

It was hot, just past the solstice,

that expected slide toward darkness.
We were resting in the library’s
coolness, waiting outside a workshop

room for a workshop to begin.

Bert was home painting the boxes.
It’s not weird, Shannon said.
It’s like cancer. It’s like when

I got my cancer diagnosis,

and I wasn’t sure then how long
I had. You live, she said, as if
you’ll be here, even though

you’re not sure you will. You still

plan, you still plant. And maybe
you’ll be here, or maybe you take
the bee box with you, where you go.

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Ed Madden is a professor of English at the University of South Carolina and author of six books of poetry, most recently A pooka in Arkansas (The Word Works, 2023), selected for inclusion in the Hilary Tham Capital Collection, an imprint featuring full-length collections by poets who volunteer to assist a nonprofit literary organization or project. He served as the inaugural poet laureate for the City of Columbia, SC, from 2015 to 2022. Madden is recipient of a Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets, a South Carolina Governor’s Award for the Arts, and artist residencies at the Instituto Sacatar in Brazil and the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Ireland.

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