Monday Memory: Spring Flowers

April 7, 2008

I love to see what's popping up in the flower gardens. We were so blessed upon moving to our house eight years ago to find flower beds well-stocked with lilies, daffodils, irises, and azaleas. But in spite of the abundance of these perennials, we still have huge spaces to fill with more plants. Every year I've split and replanted bulbs, and every year I add a few new flowers. Year by year, I'm seeing the once empty spaces blooming. Those purple columbine that the kids are behind in this picture (taken about five years ago when the kids were 2, 4, and 9) is now thick in that particular flower bed. It'll be a mass of color later this week; the first few are just opening up today. Those irises have been moved elsewhere; two rosebushes now fill in that area. It's always a work in progress.

Spring thrills me. The theme of growing things--of immersing oneself in this beautiful, verdant creation-- plays prominently within my own writing.

From a poem called "Letter to the Man I Didn't Marry":

From the front porch swing
I watched the librarian fly by on her bike
like the wicked witch and the irises rise
inch by inch. I am itching
to get my hands in the soil, to smell
the dirt caked thick and dark
beneath my nails. You were wrong,
you know. You never could have been the one
to heal me.

From "Seventeen Hours, Give or Take":

Two hours to go
and we are easy again
as if some lethal spell
has been lifted. We unzip

our stiff suits
at the state line
and toss them out the window.
Our skin beneath is warm

and smells greenly of wood.
We can’t stop breathing.

From "The Botanist and His Wife":

Back home he kills plants. First day of spring,
He sends the philodendron and African violet out
to sun on the porch, imagining their chloroplastic ecstasy.
Instead their leaves are scorched, crisp
as potato chips around the edges.

Indeed, I am inspired boundlessly by this abundant good earth. So are many other poets. Do a google search for "spring poetry" and see what you can find, and then join my Spring Poetry Contest!