This weekend we’ll be featuring poems from exciting debut collections. The first is “To a Camellia Blossom” from She Has a Name by Kamilah Aisha Moon, just published by Four Way Books:

I saw your pretty head lying
beneath the bush. Without
thinking, I kneeled
and cradled you, petals sighing
into grateful palms.  Beauty face down
is an abomination. Why
must you suffer the weight
of early perfection?  Your vividness
lifts me, lifts all. I wanted
to hold you. Just like that.
Until. I know this kind
of blooming well, to be
so lush, insides so swollen with life
that what was meant to hold you up
can’t. I wasn’t meant
to hold you, yet here we are
on this stray, brisk day in April
trembling and fulfilled, unlikely
and true. Before I knew what
to call you, I reached and imagined
season after season.  Unmoored.

(From She Has a Name © 2013 by Kamilah Aisha Moon. Reprinted with kind permission of Four Way Books. Photo of a Camellia Theaceae blossom by Thomas Mueller)