To Be A Flower

Have you ever been a flower?

Do you know what it is like
to stand, to root, to grow,
to shoot up filled with light?
To bend slowly and smoothly.

My bones have dissolved back
into the earth, as calcite.
I am golden and round at the top.
My heart is pulsing and green.
Where my leaves run, my blood is white.

Have you ever been a flower?
The flower asked me and gave me this gift
of sight, no, to feel, no, to be a flower.
Here, he said, be like me, and I will
show you how your body too can
be with every root, in every tree.
From seed to growth and back to seed
but rapidly, to be sown on every continent,
endlessly, to be unique, complete,
yet various and varied,
rooted and movable,
tall yet going down
so deep, to the gold beneath the earth
resplendent in me.