Part of my Feb 2024 Dream Poems project.
Pollen
You gather your attention,
allow your awareness to expand
until you touch the stars, the moon, the night sky,
endless, indistinct and astronomic.
Beside you, the least flower grain
unseen, though you could touch it
with your mind or your waiting hand, your
snuffling nose, your curious tongue,
if only your awareness extended so far.
If you were a bee, you might find it,
this pollen you seek without seeking,
surrender to its glamour, gather your attention,
and rub the viscous pollenkitt — the tiny pollen’s tiny coat —
lured by its singular scents and hues long ago
(before fossils were fossils) dreamed into being,
cues concocted to string you along, you and the other
bees, bats, moths, ants, and birds.
If you were a bee, you might —
instead of craning your neck, infatuated,
toward the gauzy wending path of that
distant Milky Way, awareness expanded but
day-blind still to weedy willowherb and scads of
rhododendron here at your feet, in your face,
their flowers bathed, imperceptibly, with thready
cellulose, yet more pollen fluff, called by some
“a tangling device,” wonderfully medieval —
you might, enchanted, dart among the stamen,
the anthers, brush yourself against the clinging
cobwebby strands, gathering your attention along
with your pollen, hop these viscin threads away,
stumble about in other open blossoms
whose sticky stigma untangles you, loosens you,
leaving this ripened gossamer, these filaments and
oils you’ve carted, pollen safe within,
across this fractioned light-year.
If you aren’t a bee, and only you will know,
your spacious mind might wonder why, why this frippery?
Why this delicate dedication? Why under the sky
such obsessive care, given wildly? Why such a sky,
vast and deep? Why such soil, half of Earth’s creation teeming?
Why both space and bloom brimming and spilling,
unfurling, tossing cosmic dust like petals
toward your empty hands?
©M Wms 2024
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