From The Plum Flower Dance


Lovers with Flowers

Can you contain my most intimate whisper,
settle it down after it has entered you,
make it a part of you and still cling
to my hand as gently as your eyes hold me?

Something must protect our weakness,
our mortality, and I choose the petal
and the leaf for their own transience,
as life is emboldened by mortal fear.

In this light through this glass and wood,
I sleep confidently in your murmurs and dreams,
deaf to significance, delighting
in our petty island of flowers and silences.

You have turned my soul to blazing pith.

 

Copyright © 2007 Afaa Michael Weaver. All rights reserved.

Afaa Michael Weaver is Alumnae Professor of English at Simmons College in Boston. He is the author of nine previous books of poetry including My Father's Geography and Timber and Prayer as well as short fiction and plays. He has been named a Pew Fellow in Poetry and the first Elder of Cave Canem, and was the first African American poet to hold the poet-in-residence position at the Stadler Poetry Center at Bucknell University.