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Classic and Contemporary Poetry
NIGHT-BLOOMING CEREUS, by WALKER WINSLOW
First Line: Wrapped in the night, each feels this
Last Line: This is one long year's diadem.
Subject(s): Cactus
First Line: Wrapped in the night, each feels this
Last Line: This is one long year's diadem.
Subject(s): Cactus
Wrapped in the night, each feels this,
feels the heart open as a bloom
and the voice rise
as a thin pistil in the night.
Over the dead fires of stone,
rooted in the thin sustenance of an age's erosion,
the cacti of the cereus climb the wall.
Here life is green
but green in grotesque scrawl
where lichen fails;
here something trails
through ugliness ... but night is kind.
What is defined behind that unanchored, rootless bloom,
the moon,
suspends itself above a maze
of shadowed nothingness.
Here stones dissolve, and stems,
green centipedes that climb the light,
resolve into one thing, and that thing, night.
Now there floats free,
and shall forever float though the eye closes,
shall float through fever like a dream of ice,
this moon answer spun of pearl,
this floral dynamo that generates all delicacy
stored within one season.
Even the heart is wired to this moon answer;
the veins are stem, and this ...
this is one long year's diadem.
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THE NIGHT-BLOOMING CEREUS by ROBERT EARL HAYDEN
NIGHT-BLOOMING CEREUS by MARY DILLINGHAM FREAR
TO THE SAGUARO CACTUS TREE IN THE DESERT RAIN by JAMES WRIGHT
THE NIGHT-BLOOMING CEREUS by HARRIET MONROE
NIGHT BLOOMING CEREUS by HILDEGARD OTT RUSSELL
TO THE CACTUS SPECIOSISSIMUS by LYDIA HUNTLEY SIGOURNEY
TO THE NIGHT-BLOOMING CEREUS (WRITTEN AT MIDNIGHT) by MRS. SWIFT