Petals

My poems are petals
I pick up at my feet, my poems
are little wisdoms of the body born.
A passion that does not pass
has possessed me now for fifty years.
I am the stone my poems are sculpted from,
I am the flux that changes into form.
From the ship of me, my poems
jump and jump and jump into the sea.
The wine that’s squeezed from grapes

belongs no longer to the vine.
I am proud to be, like Sappho, ex-
communicated by the Roman church.
But I do not want my work to burn,
or have my word, in its own tongue,
called foreign.
Catch my words in your mouth
Renew my body
from between the pages.
Recite me

‘til my poems become you,
‘til thus we touch with skin of words.
With eyes and teeth of poetry
I see the splendor and the brevity
of everything that we call real;
and sense the wondrous whiff
of shining just behind it.
Like petals dried to hold their scent,
poems blown through time
resuscitate! Use mine.

©Susa Silvermarie 2020
with thanks to Jeanette Winterson’s Art and Lies