Who knew how the apple was made?
We decrypted rumours, white whiskers
of truth from the textbooks of the day.
Some things were certain: we’d no orchards,
no farms, no vineyards or everglades, just buzzing
recollections from kaput holotapes.
So we placed our faith in technology,
trusted the data. We built solar wings, hives
of Nanoreplica Apis to seek and recover.

Now they swarm space. We hope they fly safe
in their waggledance through distant galaxies.
We’re the workers, tracking signals we don’t know
the tail-end of. We need a cache, a golden seed
of DNA to name our saviour. We’ve no gods anymore,
but we pray the bees will return, save us from our self
made endless drift, our fruitless catastrophe.