Poem : From Blossoms.

I've been posting a weekly poem for the last month or so, but one has yet to come to me this Tuesday. My poetry is spontaneous, born of a quiet moment or a thought that refuses to leave me alone.

Other poetry is like that for me, too. Sometimes the pieces I come across echo in my mind for days, weeks, months, years, forever. I read this poem in this book a few years ago, and then I memorized it for a recitation in my Oral Interpretation class my senior year in college. It's been reverberating in my thoughts ever since. Fragments of it come to me in the shower, in the car, on a walk, over the stove, on my porch on sunny mornings, or in the chair next to my mom's hospital bed, like this past weekend when I found myself wishing for a day like the one Lee describes here.

From Blossoms
BY LI-YOUNG LEE

From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the boy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward   
signs painted Peaches.

From laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.

O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into   
the round jubilance of peach.

There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

Do you have any poems that do that for you? Please share.

P.S. Thanks for the well wishes and sweet comments on Thursday's post; she was sent home today and is probably enjoying a bowl of chicken soup for the first time in a couple weeks as you read this. Much love, friends.

[Image found here.]