White cosmos sing the song of lily  

by Thomasin LaMay


Snowy day in late fall,
clusters of white cosmos shoot from frozen dirt,
feathered arms and fragile blooms
lifted fine as butterfly wings.
They want to fly. 

I want to cut, to save,
bring them in from cold and futile birth.
They start to sing.

Hear the song of lily. 
We come ahead, announce beginning,
do not mark her virgin.

Lily’s flower is not from seed,
her rapture self-conceived. She waits
for her story to thaw.

Gently, cosmos offers me
her green and juicy stem.  I lick
up the ripened length of her spine,
 
tongue to petals

all my lips tingle


* * * * *

Thomasin LaMay is a writer, singer and teacher. She’s taught music and women/gender studies at Goucher College, Baltimore and currently works with high school kids/women/victims of trauma at Penn North. Her poems have most recently appeared in Thimble Literary Journal, The Ekphrastic Review, and Yellow Arrow Journal. She lives in Baltimore city with about 500 books and plants, a dog, two cats and for fun she plays drums.