Monday, March 9, 2015

Tuesday Poem - 'Pink Forget-Me-Not' by Jennifer Compton


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.

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