Yellow Mums

 yellow mums

little dark green shadow

to june's

boastful, favored roses--

they have all

turned to twisted thorns

married to

the clippers' blades

but you

love the autumn

and are

humbly lovely now

aren't you,

yellow mums?

Lilacs And Ashes

 

1. ‘The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.’- Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Dent Dutton, 1955

I brought you lilacs and ashes

wrapped in paper milled from early mornings and blind starlings.

On the paper were written a million words

that when translated sickened and when spoken disappeared.

I touched you and grew old but was reborn in the lilacs.

You gave me caramels and sickrooms,

wide verandas where ghosts sang madrigals with sisters of the moon.

You gave me the world's most beautiful door but kept the key.

Your skin was sweet on my tongue, but my tongue became a road to nowhere.

In the ditches there were lilacs, on the hillsides, marigolds.

I wrote you a million poems and grew leaner with each stanza.

You said, "Come in! Come in!" from a dark hall that narrowed into nothing. 

Such was our love. Such was the starling with its injuries,

hiding in the lilac ditch. Such was the silent book,

the radiant rose, the bright marigolds on the coffin of time.

The moon makes me remember and I cannot forgive

its ruined face

so pale

so luminous

so sorrowful

like a Japanese lantern at the canceled wedding of joy and misery.

_________

for Dverse Poetics, hosted by Linda Lyberg. 

Floral Arrangement

When time has come for me to rot,
forget forget-me-nots.

Place touch-me-nots upon my grave--
no rose, nor lily, nor daisy;
and dig it far from madding crowd--
the loud, the false, the crazy.

Say few words, if any you must--
and lace them through with laughter
that unrepentant madmen know--
then silence ever after. 
______

A flash 55 for my BFF's weekly bacchanal. 

 

All Revealed

Florists
often sing each to each
from beach and gondola
and also from pier and bay.

Water, they know, is essential to soul,
and no drop can exist removed and solo.
Like floral film-makers, they study p.o.v.,
framing, lighting and, in every arrangement, fragrance and hue.
What results is a visual sweetness.

Florists wait until the optimum moment to speak,
as if words were buds blessed in shades of crimson, saffron and blue.
From pool and bowl and vase they call,
vining and trailing over container and wall,
as simple as sparrows, and as mysterious as Anasazi.
________

for Hedge's challenge at Real Toads, featuring the art of Odilon Redon. At top, find his painting "Flowers."