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# From Blossoms
- URL: https://poetry101.love/from-blossoms/
- Published: 2020-11-15T21:17:00.000Z
- Updated: 2022-10-30T18:55:12.000Z
- Description: by Li-Young Lee
- Author: Melissa Anderson
- Tags: Li-Young Lee, Morning Memory, #Import 2026-11-04 19:11

From blossoms comes  
this brown paper bag of peaches  
we bought from the boy  
at the bend in the road where we turned toward   
signs painted *Peaches*.  
  
From laden boughs, from hands,  
from sweet fellowship in the bins,  
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent  
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,  
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.  
  
O, to take what we love inside,  
to carry within us an orchard, to eat  
not only the skin, but the shade,  
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold  
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into   
the round jubilance of peach.  
  
There are days we live  
as if death were nowhere  
in the background; from joy  
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,  
from blossom to blossom to  
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

Lee, Li-Young. [Rose: Poems](https://www.google.com/books/edition/Rose/OXYpUlu5CJMC?hl=en&gbpv=0&kptab=getbook&ref=poetry101.love). United States, BOA Editions, 1986.

### Why I chose this poem

I came across this poem on Twitter among an offering of poems about food for Thanksgiving, that problematic US holiday. I instantly fell into expansive, openhearted joy. As I took it inside me, which is what the Morning Memory project on this site is all about, I discovered that I choked up ... the sweet subjunctive of it. As if death were no where in the background. But, of course, it is. And it's not death that summons the grief, it's every numbed out, wasted moment that I grieve.