Lizzy Burnam 🐞

Hope is the essence of an orange peel: 
the sweet outcome of a sun-bathed season 
and the prologue of a maggot’s meal. 
You have to get out of bed 
in the morning, so pick a reason: 
hot coffee, the smell 
of your coconut shampoo, the thrill 
of intellectualizing your existential dread, 
or to see how tall and steady 
your celery plant grew
in the gentle overnight drizzle. 
Love is not a sensation; it’s completion. 
And alongside the life-sustaining dew 
of caring dearly is a strange beauty 
and loneliness which will always exist 
inside yourself. The shadows aren’t the dust 
you keep trying to sweep away 
with bigger, more violent brooms. 
That dust is you—clearly!—you are Venus, 
Vega, and the moon, wealthy 
in spontaneity and second chances, on god, 
and courage-giving words to say 
to the weeping child 
still holding tight to the lilac tree. 
Every good flower knows 
to bloom stronger and wilder after a storm. 
You can’t eat what you don’t sow. 
So press your ear to the dirt 
and take a lesson in elysium from the worms.