I’ve never seen the world the bee sees,
a world of iridescence in which petals
change color depending on the angle,
a world in which a field of sunflowers appear
not as a smear of yellow but as individual
blooms. I’ve never seen the bullseye
pattern in the primrose or the pansy,
these human eyes unable to perceive
designs in UV light. Today I look out
at the empty garden where just last week
there were marigolds and calendula,
and I see the absence of flowers, but also,
I see mounds of golds, yellows, oranges, and
I see the boy who used to sit on the edge
of the wooden beds and I see the young
version of me, not yet gray, weeding
the rows, while the boy tells me stories
about school and the things he longs
for beyond what he has. They’re there,
I know, the flowers, the woman,
the boy, though somehow they’re so far
beyond the spectrum not even
the bees can see them.
Posts Tagged ‘flowers’
Eyesight
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged bees, flowers, garden, grief, mother, sight, vision on October 21, 2025| 9 Comments »
The Change
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged aging, beauty, change, death, flowers, frost, garden on October 5, 2025| 14 Comments »
Overnight, the frost
took every pink zinnia
every creamy dahlia,
fading their colors to brown.
The nasturtiums have slumped
into dense wilted tangle.
The marigolds hold themselves tall
in a blackened and upright
surrender. For now,
the bright, fresh bouquets
I made yesterday are still
bright and fresh in their vases.
This beauty, we know, won’t stay.
The message is simple:
All that rises passes away.
I see it in these hands
that planted and watered
and weeded and picked—
my skin now wrinkled and thin
as frost-withered petals.
Here: the chance to witness
my own rising and passing.
How natural to age, to die.
The flowers in the vase will wilt.
With every day, so do I.
Such strange gift. First
the joy of putting the self
in service to making something
beautiful. Then, beyond joy,
the grace in learning to let it all go.
Case Study in Insanity
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged flowers, garden, growing, insanity, persistance, planting, trying, zinnias on August 30, 2025| 4 Comments »
Every year, the zinnias have died,
or else have come so close to dying
I’ve dug out their bare, stunted stems
and frost-browned leaves and planted
trusty petunias. But this year. This year
an enchantment of zinnias. A profusion
of red. Magenta. Yellow. Orange. White.
An astonishment of beauty. A bright
constellation of earthbound joy.
You have heard this, too: insanity
is doing the same thing again expecting
different results. So let me be insane.
For this is the year when again
I bought zinnia starts and hoped
for abundance and was stunned
by flamboyant abundance. It’s making
me wonder what else I might sow
until I no longer have energy to plant:
Kindness. Forgiveness. Trust. Love.
Just because they haven’t always flourished
before, well, look at all these zinnias
outside my door, brilliant and burgeoning,
dozens and dozens, and sure, they will die
come winter, but for now, more flowers arrive
every day. Brilliant. Just look at all those petals.
So Alive
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged flowers, garden, grief, holy, loss on August 15, 2025| 22 Comments »
Finn, the larkspur are nearly done blooming now,
the tall stalks are scruffy with seed pods where
the dark blue petals used to be.
Is it strange to give you the garden report?
Today is four years since you chose to leave
this world of bindweed and deep red dahlia,
this world of millipedes and green beans
dangling on their vines. The sky is thick
with smoke from a wildfire not so far away.
It was a relief when it began to rain
while I was picking snapdragons and
sunflowers, zinnias and lavender.
I didn’t mind getting drenched
while I filled five vases with flowers,
four vases for our home and one
your father and I took to your grave.
I felt so alive in the middle of the storm,
arranging the blooms in vases just so
while the water dripped from my hair, my nose.
Felt so alive as I smelled the air and spoke
to you and the flowers and sky.
Today my friend Wini told me one way
to keep life sacred is to ask the holy to come.
Please, I said as I stood in the rows.
Please, come. Is it possible the asking itself
is the bridge from the everyday to the holy?
Because I felt it. There in the rain
with my grief-bent heart. There beside
the calendula, aphids and all. Hair plastered
to my head. Tears on my face. Memory
of you writing I love you in the carrot bed.
Me making bouquets for a difficult day.
Even when it hurts, the holy.
The Choosing
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged flowers, garden, parts of self, self-acceptance, younger self on July 16, 2025| 4 Comments »
Sometimes, when picking flowers
from the garden, I choose not
the showiest blooms, but the snapdragon
with the crooked stem or the pink cosmos
with the slenderest petals or the delphinium
stalk with the fewest blue flowers. Aren’t you lovely,
I say to them as I snip at their stems
and arrange them in a vase, placing them
in the center of my home. In these moments
I am aware of the gangly child I was, crooked-
stemmed and awkward, who longed to be chosen.
I like the way the room feels different
because the flowers are there. I like the way
they change me, too, as if I am saying
to that gawky part of me who felt unlovable,
I choose you. I choose you. I choose you.
What if, instead of grief,
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, flowers, grief, pollination, survival on September 3, 2024| 13 Comments »
we call it pollination,
a process through which we realize
the gold of our hearts must spill out
and if we are to survive as a species,
it requires we somehow exchange
this gold with each other—all our hearts
splayed open, all our hearts needing
what the other hearts have.
It’s messy. Vulnerable.
And this is how we go on.
Your grief. My grief.
The quiet buzz of conversation.
This splitting open. This spilling.
This sharing with each other.
What We Sow
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged bees, flowers, kindness, wild iris on May 31, 2024| 8 Comments »
More than twenty years ago,
I planted several wild iris beside the pond.
Today, I sit beside a generous patch
of fluttering blue flags and watch
a gold-dusted bumblebee clumsily
swerve from bloom to bloom to bloom.
Such joy they bring, these wild iris that rise
and multiply every spring. They remind me of how
kindness, too, is rhizomic, how
years ago you planted in me
something beautiful before you left.
If you came again to my shores,
would you be surprised to see
how your kindness continues to spread?
Two Days Before Mother’s Day I Visit Your Grave
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged artificial flowers, bereaved mother's day, fading, flowers, grave, grief, love on May 11, 2024| 6 Comments »
They are faded, the pink roses
made of fabric someone left
at your grave, and the leaves,
once green, are faint shades
of yellow, and I love them,
these petals that are so much more
than frayed polyester,
transformed as they are
into remembrance. Someone
else misses you, too.
Why does this move me so?
I, too, am fraying. Fading.
Being unmade. I do not mind
the undoing, the new way of being
less interested in perfection.
It’s what happens,
the price for choosing
to show up in all weather
to honor who we love.
I weep for a while beside
the granite with your name in it.
As always, you’re still with me
when I go.
In a Time of Little Hope
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged flowers, grief, growth, hope on December 23, 2023| 18 Comments »
In one day, the paperwhites
surge into life—
this heart, too,
has been forced to grow quickly.
Is it any wonder I thrill
to see this leaping up
toward light?
Any wonder I’ve begun to believe
in impossible things?
Aftermath
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged beauty, flowers, kindness on August 29, 2023| 10 Comments »
Those seeds you planted
in me with your words—
all through the night they rooted,
grew stems, sprouted leaves.
By morning, I’m in full bloom,
my thoughts a rebellion of petals,
a mutiny of beauty
where once only shadows spread.
All day, your words unfold
in layers of purples and unruly golds.
I like it when people stare—
everywhere I go, I share this:
the aftermath of your kindness.
The Bouquet
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged beauty, dandelion, flowers, wishes, youth on August 16, 2022| 8 Comments »
for Summer, Autumn, Lulu and Katie From the garden, the girls brought a small bouquet of late summer’s loveliest flowers: snapdragons, nasturtiums, lavender, salvia, and the fernlike leaves of marigold. And there in the center, like a guest who did not care what clothes she was given to wear to the ball, was the white globe of dandelion gone to seed, its white filigree quite unlike all the other petals. How could I not notice this orb of wishes still waiting to be wished? How I longed to spend all the wishes on these girls who had seen this fragile sphere as a gift. May they be happy. May they be sure they are loved. May they know their own beauty beyond any mirror. May they flourish in all soils. May they believe their own hearts. May they trust their own voices. May they find friends wherever they travel. May they feel vital in any bouquet. May they know love. Again and again. Live into the fullness of each ordinary moment. And wherever they grow, may they know for certain the earth itself will carry them. |
Transplanting the Nasturtiums
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged flowers, garden, resilience, self talk on July 25, 2021| Leave a Comment »
They don’t like it. For a day,
maybe two, they’ll hang limp
in the beds. I try to talk them
through it, try to tell them
it will be okay. But no one
wants to hear it will be okay
when it feels as if
the world is ending,
especially not nasturtiums—
nasturtiums can’t hear,
which makes me wonder
how much of what I say
to comfort others is really
intended to comfort myself.
In two days, the nasturtiums
will be upright and bright.
And I’ll praise them, tell them
I knew they could do it,
tell them how resilient they are.
Wild Iris
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged dark, flowers, friendship, pond, wild iris on May 15, 2021| 2 Comments »
From a handful of wild iris
planted years ago,
dozens of slender spears
and stems now rise beside the pond—
their pale purple flags
wave in allegiance to spring
and each other.
They know how to grow
not just up but to the side,
how to send out lateral roots
that will someday be new blooms.
Old friends are like rhizomes—
connected by invisible roots,
resilient, perceiving the light as good,
but knowing, too, how essential
to grow through the dark.
How Much Wider?
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ache, flowers, heart, vase, weeds on May 11, 2021| Leave a Comment »
Tonight the heart
is a vase filled
with thistles
and lilies, burdock
and roses, knapweed
and voluptuous peonies.
It is perhaps not
the bouquet I would choose,
but it is what is here.
But it’s hard to hold it all,
I say to the world.
And it is. It’s too much,
I say. But is it?
And I’m scared
the vase will break.
But it doesn’t.
Instead it widens
to contain what is in it—
stems of puncturevine
and poppies,
leafy spurge and
delicate lisianthus.
And so I hold it,
I hold it all.
And the vase doesn’t break,
but oh, as it widens,
the ache.
Saying Thank You
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged bouquet, flowers, gratefulness, gratitude, love, thank you on March 17, 2021| 2 Comments »
I want to bring to the doorstep of your heart
a giant bouquet of soft-petalled words,
a lavish bouquet of gratitudes
grown from seed in which each bloom
remembers each time
I watered it, encouraged it,
pulled the weeds from around its stem.
I want to have amended the soil
in which these appreciations grew
with the mycelium of devotion,
the dark compost of love.
It matters, the ways we say thank you.
Those two words disappear from the air
in less than a second,
so is it any wonder, when you
with your love have changed me forever,
that I want to bring you
a whole garden of gratefulnesses
no, a whole field of eternal thank yous
in which every flower is astonishingly open
and the perfume fills
every room in your heart.
Castilleja scabrida
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged beauty, desert, flowers, plants, youth on April 6, 2020| 2 Comments »
It’s not that they are hiding—
it’s more that they know
the power of a red dress.
Between slabs of red sandstone,
the tiny yellow green flowers
of the desert paintbrush
decorate themselves
with bright red bracts,
colorful flame-like spears
that attract butterflies,
hummingbirds and bees.
It’s what we do to survive,
those of us born plain,
those of us otherwise ignored.
I think of the homely girl I was
who wanted to wear
gold combs in her hair
to the middle school dance,
as if something shiny and bright
might attract the honey boys.
I want to go back to that gym
with its streamers and balloons
and take the gold combs
out of her mousy brown hair
and tell her the brightest parts of her
are inside. I want to tell her
that being a small green
and yellow flower
will serve her.
I want her to know
that a day will come
when she’ll walk in the desert
and feel so at one
with the cliffs and the scrub brush,
the lichen and the Mormon tea,
and that in that moment
when she loses her sense of herself
and merges with slickrock
and paintbrush and sky
it is then she will be most beautiful.
Viola Tricolor
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged blossoming, Corona Virus, death, flowers, medicine, showing up, spring, wildflowers on March 31, 2020| 2 Comments »
also known as Johnny jump up, heart’s ease, heart’s delight, come and cuddle me
Into the shade by the porch
bloomed the first wild pansy,
its small yellow face sunny
and eager and open.
The Athenians used to make
the tiny flowers into syrup
to moderate anger and
to comfort and strengthen the heart.
And here it is today,
small volunteer beauty,
growing in this patch of dirt
where nothing else wants to grow.
This tiny garden is but one of many
concurrent realities—others involve
hospitals short of beds, loved ones
gone, doctors scared to go home.
Our hearts need strengthening.
Little violet, we’re learning, too,
how to be surrounded by death
and still rise up, bring healing as we bloom.
The Truth
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged flowers, garden, seeds, speaking, sunflower, truth on January 20, 2020| 2 Comments »
Inside the bright words
there are other words
that want to be said—
small words
in dark shells.
.
It reminds me
of the sunflowers
that grew in the fall—
how we loved them
for their golden petals,
but they were true
to the small dark seeds
that grew them,
to the small dark seeds
they grew.
Floral Rx
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged daughter, flowers, help, helplessness, medicine, mother, poem, poetry on July 23, 2019| 5 Comments »
Because I cannot fix her heart,
I plant flowers in the two empty pots
on my mother’s high rise patio.
She’s always loved flowers around the house—
peonies and petunias in Wisconsin,
succulents and larkspur in Colorado.
She taught me when I was a girl
how to deadhead the plants
to produce more blooms,
how to make the snapdragon
open its reptilian mouth, how
to tell the story of Cinderella
by carefully dissecting the bleeding heart,
how to make touch me nots spit their seeds,
and how a few flowers around the home
bring immeasurable joy. And so
I pick out white and blue lobelia and
a soft gray vine and a hot pink begonia
and other flowers and vines I can’t name
and we sit on her patio together
in the late afternoon sun
and arrange the potted plants.
There is something about planting flowers
together that changes the way
you see the flowers—the same way
a soup tastes better when made
by someone who loves you—
and I thrill to think of her
looking out the window and seeing
the bright red geraniums surrounded
by purples and blues and greens
and thinking to herself, wow,
that girl really loves me, and
surely, surely, though it won’t
fix her heart, surely it will do some good,
those draping pink petunias
so familiar, so new.
Perception
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged beauty, connection, flowers, poem, poetry, wild iris on June 11, 2019| Leave a Comment »
beside the floodplain
acre after acre of pale blue
thousands of wild iris—
just thinking of sharing them
they become (is it possible?)
yes, more beautiful