Listen, stamen: your surrender is just a beginning,
the spinous distance between desire and the quiet
clinch of satisfaction. Take the hexagon, how it
will fill, fanned with wings that mean to bring

April's nascent truths. In winter, I will not ask
where the bees have gone. I will walk to the grove
in my old boots and give ear. Littlest of lovers,
vested in pistil and comb, I speak now to you: dance

your tremble. Perhaps you of all, not drone but roamer, know
what purple means—given, some morning darker than

the human hymn of misgivings, you turn home
and make there what the orchid could not, alone.

Only your precision is a secret: prism of nectar, haven of gold—
I want what you want, and the stamen, and the sun.

—Susanna Childress has her second collection of poems, Entering the House of Awe, forthcoming later this year from New Issues Press.

Copyright © 2011 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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