Poem for Thursday and Brookside Flowers

Day Lilies
By Rosanna Warren

For six days, full-throated, they praised
the light with speckled tongues and blare
        of silence by the porch stair:
honor guard with blazons and trumpets raised
still heralding the steps of those
        who have not for years walked here
        but who once, pausing, chose

this slope for a throng of lilies:
and hacked with mattock, pitching stones
        and clods aside to tamp dense
clumps of bog-soil for new roots to seize.
So lilies tongued the brassy air
        and cast it back in the sun's
        wide hearing. So, the pair

who planted the bulbs stood and heard
that clarion silence. We've heard it,
        standing here toward sunset
as those gaping, burnished corollas poured
their flourish. But the petals have
        shrivelled, from each crumpled knot
        droops a tangle of rough

notes shrunk to a caul of music.
Extend your palms: you could as well
        cup sunbeams as pour brim-full
again those absent flowers, or touch the quick
arms of those who bent here, trowel in
        hand, and scraped and sifted soil
        held in a bed of stone.

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It rained all day Wednesday and I had a headache so I have nothing of interest to report except a headache, lots of local flooding, and being pissed off at the Obama Administration over a host of issues concerning privacy, citizens' rights and most recently Plan B. So have some photos from the Brookside Gardens conservatory last weekend, and I shall try to be more awake and less cranky tomorrow night.