Pink Forget-Me-Not
It's a sport —
she said.
Don't plant it
near the blue
it'll breed back.
She shrugged. It'll
breed back
anyway, they
always do.
One season
wonders.
I put it in a
splendid isolation
game and pink and
different
not as leggy as the
blue.
Next season there
were some pinks
scruffy and
thwarted, then
they were gone. I
couldn't keep them.
But, as my son said
—
Bees can fly over
the house.
Down the line
one petal, small as
a baby's toenail
pink as
in a thrusting
vernacular of blue.
My new book Now You Shall Know from Five Islands Press is out
and we kicked our heels up at the launch at Collected Works in
February. What surprised me is the young members of the editorial
team seemed to quite take to my gardening poems in the last section
called - ... somehow urgent. And then I read this one at the Ron
Pretty Poetry Prize award night, and it went down quite well. In fact
I had discussions with several people about gardening in general
and forget-me-nots in particular. Of course I should have mentioned
in the poem the impudent way a forget-me-not will latch seeds onto
your socks in pursuit of its territorial imperatives.
I love 'pink as'
ReplyDeleteGo the pinks!