Happy National Poetry Month! We are honored to bring you poems from a special project, “Poetry in Bloom,” a collaboration with O, Miami Poetry Festival, poets Sandra Beasley and Neil de la Flor, and Dolly’s Florist. For all of April, these poems about flowers are being folded into origami and sent out with bouquets from Dolly’s. They also appear on O, Miami and on SWWIM in a variety of accessible ways, including audio, ALT text, and more.
In the high desert, the columbine drinks up some shade. Chromes the dark with its risings. I spend days walking the familiar reel of this land. Doves one shade of gray tap about together. Rabbits long limbed lodge in slight dew. Under sun. Beyond scarcities, cholla hold the ungentle world in their ungentle arms. Indian paintbrush in orange life vests trust roadsides. I see blue sage and sneezeweed, nipple cactus, globemallow. Prickly pear in its khakis and between lizards fence- found bee balm. The coneflower carefree and gleeful. For 26 years, I have looked beyond hinges to gold- tipped yarrow and multiplying cosmos—and because distance sings itself loud here, I can even see lavender in its savannah with its smoky moss eight towns off. Squat by the gaura in a mist of pink tutus and beside it, the claret cup with its hat full of idling hummingbirds, and blue flax and buckwheat, and why not watch the many lips of penstemon too as they shout out their deep red haiku— Everywhere, small forces. A clandestine vision.
Lauren Camp is the author of five books, most recently Took House (Tupelo Press), which Publishers Weekly calls a “stirring, original collection.” Her poems appear in Witness, Poet Lore, New England Review, and other journals in the US and abroad. Honors include the Dorset Prize and finalist citations for Best of the Net, the Arab American Book Award and the New Mexico-Arizona Book Award. Her poems have been translated into Mandarin, Turkish, Spanish, and Arabic. See www.laurencamp.com for more.
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