for James & Brad
In late July, if you’re lucky, you wander
through the flower gardens your friends
have been nurturing for years—red beds
of bee balm and yellow mounds of St. John’s Wort,
long purple spears of butterfly bush
and thick golden stands of rudbeckia,
and all around you the buzzing, the humming,
the pollinators thrumming, the weaving
of bees and the braiding of birds
and somehow, standing in this thriving place
so lovingly tended and mindfully grown,
you are flooded with admiration for your friends
so great you disappear into the fullness
and emerge with new roots of your own,
one more living thing shaped by the care
and kindness they bring to the world.