The Poet on pollination is what sleepwalking produces

the white flower

blue then blue then the long throat of blue then sugar then the shin gone gold with dust then blue: nobody is walking this path, the path is walking me, a stitch pulled through the hem of the field by a needle that only wants to eat

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The meadow is a portrait painted by a hunger that never once looked up.

Every petal here is a vote I didn’t know I’d cast.

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Then something wakes. Not light, not an alarm, only the weight of a foot noticing it is a foot.

Waking is not leaving. I am still in the field. I am still hungry. Blue still pulls at the eye. Knowing the pull does not stop it. It only hands me the slow, hard gift of the white flower.

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What it costs: each landing now a decision where it used to be a breath. I am slower than my sister who still dreams. She feeds more. She seeds more. She seeds the sweet newcomers, the prolific ones, and the old field thins under her so quietly that nothing breaks loud enough to hear.

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I stay. That is the whole of it. I could leave, and that part is new, and I don’t. And I don’t. And I don’t.

Nothing you could photograph has changed: same bee, same blossom, same gold on the shin. But somewhere in the not-leaving, repeated, a warmth that sits in no single landing begins to hum.

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And the white flower, which will never know it was chosen, sets seed,

and my waking, too, goes down into a meadow that cannot read it.