Hymnal for Edvard
Small magics are afoot, strange alchemies
turning the sparrows into soothsayers.
The undertaker sheds his soot-black jacket,
blows the dust off the oaken coffin lid. Planting
flowers into the womb of earth; bluebells, hyacinths,
the old gray widow. They will come again next year
because they always do. Because they know
no other way but up up up, daffodils raising their heads
toward the sulfur-pheasant sun. A shovel that gleams golden
in the noon-light, a spasmic stirring of wings
in your full belly’s aviary. Bees sweeping out
their honeycombs with spidery twig-haired brooms.
Roadkill unfolds itself from the warming asphalt like tulips,
innards flapping petal-like in the mild March breeze.
Sap, blood, and dew clot into sonnets
on the meadow of our wet pink tongues.
Our breath is enough to make us holy, our blood-
scorched palms always grasping for something,
our cruel exalted wants. How magnificent is our fallibility,
our bodies that vessel the light. Frail but feral as foxes,
we climb on the highest cherry tree branches
to swallow big gulps of the sky.
We stretch our limbs heavenwards always, even from
the sepulcher below. Where we stick our roots is a pear tree
orchard that never runs out of fruit. Who knows
where they end, if ever. Spring days, lambed love,
the apple core of ourselves — these things don’t perish but ripen
buried under moon and mud. Worms and saplings, the red
breast of a robin feasted upon by ants. Bones that remember
they were forged to soar. Mushrooms pushing
through a corpse’s eye, violets crowning the guts.
The language of spring is persistence, a reawakening
of rot into bloom. A sempiternal offering of trust
to be carried by wind and wing. The stubborn belief of a calf
to always be born head-first.
From deep beneath, the lovely dead
tickle the crocus shoots out of the dampened soil,
coax the grass to sprout. Blackbirds in the ruined church spires,
mouths that know nothing but song. You look into the bell
of a …
For #PoemsAbout #InBloom ✨
for @thebrokenspine.co.uk
& @alanparrywriter.co.uk
Didn’t make it on time again… one could say I’m a late bloomer (forgive me) 🌷
