A garden party

I answered the invitation
from the shy and whispering flowers and
standing in her garden as the heat of the day
began its increase I thought to myself that
the air in July feels more willing to accept and
promote the heat from the objects it surrounds,
more than the winter air.

As the yellow flowers unfurled
their secret hearts before me, the strawberries
with their thousand mouths
confessed that my presence was required
from an invitation of the Honeybee.

The tomatoes leaned closer in their cages.

“Oh no,” I had remarked to Mme. Honeybee
while baptizing glebed-floral mouths
in a diurnal effluence from the hose,
“Please don't sting. Just as you dance
within the floral cup, serving life
through your buzzing ministrations,
so too with dousing water wand in hand and
a humming-way, do I.”

And that, I gather, is how the radiant flowers knew,
toiling as they had these warming months
in their soiled excavations
all for the very moment
before the heat became unbearable
to offer back all they had borrowed
from the sun:

That I could bear their loveliness
and that some of it is safe in me.