not all of us are perennials

not all of us are perennials

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Hey! Good luck @Lovestrike! <3 Excited for your poetry this month! You've got a beautiful title there!

it forces me to pause
heart open
finding no fault
only struggling to hold
such beauty

overwhelming
in its scope
how can the world
be so ferociously
lovely?

you never used to
like the idea of gardening
you thought it was something
for women in straw sunhats
with age-softened hands
tending sprouts

too much to nurture
to remember to water daily --
you were never maternal
enough to grow something
you believed

when you bought the first seedlings
you were as terrified as you were
any time a new mother asked
if you wanted to hold
the baby.

the sequoia could
have been the center
of the cosmos

thick trunk holding
hell and heaven
and our middle earth
together like
a stacking abacus

a turning of the world
and what was buried
sent to the sky.

Ah! Love the layered image in this latest poem! Very thought-provoking.

the nights are so long now
she feels old before
she has reason to be

still she loves
the way orion rises
from his summer bed
and cassiopeia
migrates heavenward
like a star-winged bird

she loves how the winter
takes the ocean waves
and hammers them out
along the beach

the sky and water
steel grey upon grey.

trees learn death early
every autumn

leaves dropping away
with such grace
that the final change where
roots go cold feels to them
no great burden.

Lovestrike wrote:trees learn death early

!!!

That! That is an entire theme within your theme, right there.

there is something
about cherry blossoms

ethereal and full
and floating and so fragile
you know even as you breathe
in their beauty

the first rain will
strip them from skyward
until the trees are empty

the ground
matted with the flesh
of petal upon petal will soon
sink into the earth.

i would lose all
other sensations before
the warmth of the sun
on cool skin

solar fusion
like a lover's touch
gentle on your shoulder
as it always will be.

we are that of
saplings and seedlings
and the plants that writhe
out of the sidewalk

sometimes
i wonder if the heart
can only be in so many
places at once

a promise swelling
tell me again and again
how the grass grew back
still green.

it runs a canyon
down my heart

welling life
within my ribcage
waves spilling
over reservoir edges
across long plains
of freckled skin

the feel of
things growing joyful
in the desert outside
a cosmic coming.