A Single Kiss Poem by Daniel Brick

You enter the garden alone
and shut the gate behind you.
You walk swiftly across the lawn
to a tree-shaded place where
your favorite bush of white flowers
grows apart from other bushes.
It feels no fear with your arrival
because you are a woman who writes
poems and thus cherishes everything
touched by the sun, cleansed by rain,
and raised to higher awareness nightly
by moonbeams...
You bend low and place the whisper
of a kiss on a single petal, and it
awakens the latent heart of the flower.
You see nothing happening, but inside
your single kiss releases every flower
from sleep, and tendrils of desire
shoot through the veins and branches
of the bush. Every flower is tense
with borrowed yellow energy of the sun
and seeks to express itself in waves of
fragrance, like the flow of honeyed words
from the mouth of an inspired Sufi poet.
You settle on a blanket beneath an elm tree,
and open your journal to a blank page soon
to be filled with your summer thoughts.
The sun from its lordly summit of power
sends rays which cause a surge of fragrance
from the petals which mingles with your
native fragrance, and both rise into
the ambient air and spread across the garden.
And nothing wicked or mean can withstand
the goodness of this amplified air. All evil is
dispelled by its greater power. You and all
living things breathe deeply this pure air.

Hours later, after you have left the garden,
closing the gate behind you, the exhausted sun
surrenders its fires to the coming night,
Moon beams descend and restore the white flowers
to their vegetative life. The petals curl into
slumber once again, dreaming of you and how
you summoned them to a vivid life with the grace of...
A S I N G L E K I S S