PAD Challenge Day 6: Blossom of Change

 Today's prompts from Robert Lee Brewer's "Write Better Poetry" blog and Maureen Thorson's NaPoWriMo blog: (1) Write a "change" and/or "don't change" poem, and (2) borrowing an exercise from poet Holly Lyn Walrath: "Go to a book you love. Find a short line that strikes you. Make that line the title of your poem. Write a poem inspired by the line. Then, after you’ve finished, change the title completely."

I didn't follow the second prompt exactly, because I actually lifted my line from the incredibly moving ending of James Wright's wonderful poem, "A Blessing," about meeting two horses in a field. I wrote a response poem to that one, using the last line as my tentative title, and I did change it afterward, but I just couldn't discard what is one of my favorite closing lines of a poem ever, so it became my epigraph. I was thinking about riddling the more knowledgable poetry readers as to which poem inspired mine, but I don't know if it's well-known enough, and besides, I just felt like putting everything "out there." So here it is, a sort of very loose unrhymed sonnet:

Bursting

Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.
- James Wright, "A Blessing"
 
I can't imagine what would change my life
that I would feel so extraordinary
to travel out of body from the husk
of my skin long enough to realize
that very moment could cause me to bloom
like a morning glory, unfolding in real time,
predawn blue, with a sun in the middle.
Bonding with a fellow creature of the world,
lying in afterglow with my first love,
hearing my first Beethoven symphony?
Maybe I can visualize it after all,
not as a zinnia or peony,
but as a milkweed pod bursting open,
launching its downy seeds into the wind.