A Bouquet of Summer

Someone left a bouquet of field flowers by my door. Flowers picked along a country lane.

Years ago, my granddaughter picked a fistful of English daisies that insisted on growing on the lawn. They were not weeds for me, and for a day they smiled at me from the glass where I had put them.

Once someone gave me a rose stolen from a neighbor’s garden. It was the beginning of a love affair.

Yet in the long run, what touched me just as much was the bouquet of field flowers left anonymously by my door.  Flowers picked along a country lane. Sky blue chicory, that in less than an hour had already withered into nothing, but that held within itself the summer sun, convolvulus or bindweed, although I prefer calling them wild morning glories, thrusting its roots deep down into a hostile rocky soil, and a host of golden stars sprinkled among the grass.

None of the roses and lilies and carnations wrapped in cellophane by a florist can compete with these humble straggly flowers that have grown wild and are imbued with a beauty and a meaning all their own.   

Along a road in summer

Cerulean chicory lines the road,

ragged flecks torn from the sky.

Spikes of yellow mullein branch into

menorahs of golden stars with hearts of flame.

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Vanguards of creeping dwarf convolvulus

insinuate their way between the stones,

encroach on asphalt, dot shorn roadside banks.

Pale rosy faces greet the morning sun,

pleated cornucopias barely tinged with pink

close in upon themselves once noon is past.

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The mint has gone all straggly.

Pallid clustered calyxes of bladder campion

pinch in their mouths where rocket bursts

of curling petals make way for shooting stamen sprays.

Chalices so deep none but the nocturnal moth

can drink its nectar.

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Madder violet brushstrokes

have left their mark upon the deep-lobed petals

of the lowly mallow, a lighter mauve,

whose dark green cinquefoil leaves

stand rank against the fence.

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      One is tempted

      to stoop down and pick

      a sprig of chicory,

     hoping, once one is home,

     to imprison summer in a vase.

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     Illusion, for in less than an hour

     that sky-blue flower

      will have shrivelled

     and withered into a grey rag.

It is along the road that summer lingers on

with hosts of blossoms ever ready to

supplant those, in their turn expendable,

whose brief term of existence lasts but a day.

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      Wild things, of whatever nature,

       are best left free.

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