White Flowers
By Martin Harrison
The air the wind the outside and outsize
of what’s possible and imaginable
clear and clean endeavour into the atmosphere
of light on dark and glittering spaces
where crimson rosellas swerve sideways
into cascades of down-hanging white flowers
they land whistling in that snowy down
that galactic spray of weeping branches
now revealing themselves in an entirety
of whitenesses for a few days in a
suddenness which takes my breath away
because the enormity of the thousands
of pale-yellow-hearted four-petaled flowerlets
is an act of exposure on so huge a scale -
and to what? the wind, the next moon,
the rain-streaked winter light? the sun? -
and because the suddenness is
what suddenly and surreptitiously
strikes you (invisible, unthought
awareness) as the same naked revealedness
of your lover beneath you, beside
you or above you caught there
where humanness itself is flowering light
ecstatic with joy in the act of love