Your blooms unravel
at spring’s cusp
making bare trees blush,
unraveling something
pulled too tight in me.

An obsession,
with their return,
I uncoil so far
as to run along
green Washington lawns
under your pink umbrellas.

Cast your beauty
at my feet, like raindrops,
of tiny scented handkerchiefs
mesmerize the eye
of sunlit sky open
to your frolics.

I am lost in your resurgence,
and don’t want to be found.
Cover me with your supple petals,
faint me with your fragrance.

Alive me.
Unravel me to life.

Knowing what awaits,
every petal though-— none
fear death’s unraveling.
Consecrate me.

With the water and the sun,
the earthworms and pollinators,
the friends along the way,
helping to make these blooms
that seduce me, as time
stitches winter’s seams
into spring’s pleats,
dressing trees
in pink ball gowns
lining the lawns
I dance on.

---

Holli Terrell-Cavalluzzi, M.A. lives in Wilmington North Carolina where she has made a home by the coast. She writes prose and poetry which started in graduate school while teaching yoga.