Asphodels, How I’d Like To Be Buried With Them
Corinne Klosinski
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Within the wan and weeping vale
Where twilight tarnishes the day,
There trembles one tenebrous bloom:
The asphodel of unanswered ache.
Pale as a patient phantom’s palm,
It lifts its languid, lilting throat,
Drinking the dim and distant dew
Of mercies never meant for it.
So stands my soul, soft-stemmed, solitary,
Rooted in reverent ruin,
Fed not by sun but by the shade
Your passing presence pours.
You are the ardent, august rose,
Crowned in carmine confidence;
Bees bend bold before your blush,
And summer swears its fealty.
Yet I, the asphodel, abide
In argent air of afterthought,
Where winds, with widowed whispering,
Worry my wan and withering leaves.
I learned to love in lowered light,
To flourish faint where fervor fails;
For longing is a lunar seed
That blossoms best in borrowed beams.
Each glance you grant, gracious, brief,
Falls like a fragile frost of grace;
I freeze, yet fervently I flower,
Thriving on the thinness of hope.
O cruel cultivation of the heart!
To tend a tender, thankless thing,
To trim its tremors, tame its thorns,
And watch it whiten into want.
Still steadfast stands the asphodel,
A sentinel of silent fields,
Its petals pressed in pallid prayer
For warmth that will not wander near.
All my loves are asphodel;
They bloom in fields the living flee,
White witnesses of what was wished,
And buried while it breathed.
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Corinne Klosinski is an 18-year-old nonbinary writer and poet whose work examines the intersections of tenderness, inheritance, and self-definition, with a focus on how language can become a means of reclamation.
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Posted in Pride: June '26 and tagged in #boudin, #poetry, Poetry