Let it be said Ama was the lastHimalayan beekeeper.When she harvested honey barehandedin the stone house we lived in, she took not junipersmoke but song to the hive.A home is one blossomand a thousand stings.The bees flew into her oiled black hairand when she combed it, downfell rhododendrons.Let it be said not a singlebee stung her. The summer before I lefthome, she fed me rawhoney from her palm every night.In the dark I learned to holdbees in my throat, onefor every ancestor. Let it be saidnot a single bee died. Nowevery time I misremember the wordof the Horse-Ghost, I get stungin the windpipe. With each perishedbee, Ama becomesmore smoke. Let it be saidif you plunge your hand into an abandonedhive, you will still get stung. At nightAma plucks stingers from my tonguewith her nails. Each barb she bindsto her lock, and her crown growsmore thorn than rhododendron.Let me sky-bury them, Ama,while they are still alive. No,Tamang she opensthe wounds with crushed hoovesyou mouth is our last hive.
The Last Himalayan Beekeeper
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“The Last Himalayan Beekeeper” from N0 RHODODENDRON by Samyak Shertok.
All rights are controlled by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA 15260.
Used by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.
“The Last Himalayan Beekeeper” was first published in Shenandoah.
Samyak Shertok’s debut collection, No Rhododendron (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2025), was selected by Kimiko Hahn for the 2024 AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry and longlisted for the 2026 PEN Open Book Award. His poems appear in The Cincinnati Review, Gettysburg Review, Iowa Review, Kenyon Review, POETRY, Shenandoah, and Best New Poets. A finalist for the National Poetry Series, the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, and the Jake Adam York Prize, he has been awarded the Robert and Adele Schiff Award for Poetry, the Gulf Coast Prize in Poetry, and the Auburn Witness Poetry Prize. Originally from Nepal, he is an assistant professor at Mississippi State University.
Winner of the 2024 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry
Part elegy, part poetry of witness, and part poetry of exile, No Rhododendron is a lament to the poet-speaker’s father and fatherland and a grief-wrought love letter to his mother and mother tongue. The collection is haunted by an existential question about Shertok’s oral mother tongue, Tamang: How do you write about a language that has no script? Exploring the erasure, ambiguity, multiplicity, violence, and unknowability signified by “X,” the poems dwell on the lip of a new ghost language, which ultimately fails itself. The polyphonal witnessing of the decade-long Maoist conflict in his native Nepal from schoolchildren’s perspective reveals how a war can fracture the psyche of an entire generation. The final thread of the book, a “reverse-elegy” for his mother, meditates on the impending loss of a loved one as a potential site of mourning, impermanence, gratitude, memory-making, and mythopoeticism.
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