On Seeing

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.

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Early morning this plague year, we walk
the path that circles Andorra Meadow
on the edge of the city, full in its summer bloom 

of this flower and the next – some we have names for: 
lamb’s ear, phlox, blackberries beginning 

hard and green their journey to dark purple-sweet 
sugar. How we found each other late in our journeys, 
soft, too, and sweet: we cannot stop speaking 

our astonishment. But look, love, we’ve turned
our aging bodies one toward the other,

grinning, joining our praise songs to the trill 
of the wren, the high call of the towhee, 
the mewl of catbird. Each shade of green 

glints in your painter’s eye – grasses, blossoms, 
brambles close at hand; then shrubs, 

a copse of trees; and finally the pines, this little ring
of beauty we find ourselves within. 
Oh year of kissing you. Wanton year of delight. 

In this terrible extraordinary universe – 
how many more glistening mornings –

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Sarah Browning is the author of two books of poems, Killing Summer and Whiskey in the Garden of Eden. She is co-founder and for 10 years was Executive Director of Split This Rock. She has been guest editor or co-edited special issues of Beltway Poetry Quarterly, The Delaware Poetry Review, and POETRY magazine. She is currently a student in the MFA program in poetry and creative nonfiction at Rutgers University Camden. More at: www.sarahbrowning.net