First, I doubt it qualifies as a poem... which is sometimes mistaken for a poem or a prose poem.
Its origin was a letter I received out of the blue from a photographer in Aotearoa/New Zealand, Anne Noble... asked me to write a text for a catalog of her photographs she was preparing.
However, my permanent models for an unadorned narrative are the Icelandic sagas and classical Chinese works called anomaly accounts ( zhiguai), and my models for the condensation of large amounts of historical information are Charles Reznikoff and, in certain poems, Lorine Niedecker.
It comes from a line of Tennyson ("And murmuring of innumerable bees") that is frequently given as the perfect example of onomatopoeia.
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