Poets Salon: Bouquet

POETS SALON

Rose bush (Photo – Kath Abela Wilson)

– 8/07/19

Hosted by Kath Abela Wilson

After a long day at the city of hope, we left by a side door we had not noticed before. It opened into a small meditation garden. From there, we knew it was still a long way to the exit. The street seemed still a mile away. But it was covered with roses! Overgrown, and yet manicured, the gardens seemed to go on forever. We were stunned. The incense was heady the blooms seemed to arrange themselves in real time before our eyes, into natural bouquets.

forming our own bouquet
still on the bush
we and the roses
do not notice
any thorns

~ Kath Abela

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Nodding onion (Allium cernuum) bowing to Morning sun (Photo – Autumn Noelle Hall)

Autumn Noelle Hall

Allium cernuum

Morning sun through mountain pines reveals ethereal spheres—pink fireworks bursting here and there through tufts of buffalo grass. Dainty and delicate against rocky terrain—coaxed up by July’s regular rains—they were always her favorites, when we used to hike these trails together. For the first time, I break my own ban on wildflower-picking to bring her a tiny bouquet. Six slender stems.

I arrange them in a pearl glass onion-shaped vase and set them on the table at her place. But it will be dusk before she’ll see them. Because yesterday, she dared to leave the guest room for more than a few hours. And now the illness that took her job, her apartment, her whole hard-won independent life, has bedridden our daughter…again.

wild onions
how long underground
until
I might find her
blossoming once more…?

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Rose Bouquet, computer art by Gary Blankenship

Gary Blankenship

the blooms once bright
now wilted and faded
as we hear news
of the weekend shootings
watered by flooding tears

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Summer’s Bouquet (Photo – Kathleen A. Lawrence)

Kathleen A. Lawrence

six years old

when first assigned
the chore

collecting flowers
from my father’s garden
for the family’s dinner table bouquet

My Dad usually gave the charge, but the chore quickly became a favorite ritual, and the envy of my eight siblings. I made a bouquet almost every night.

My mother always blushed and eyes twinkled when I presented the secret nosegay from behind my back, watched her hands meet mine to gather the stems filling with icy water the crystal vase from the china cabinet, (when weather allowed,) during the summer months in Upstate, New York through high school. Sometimes I’d make them after school before my mother came home from work.

Over the years since then I have enjoyed going in my own garden to create floral arrangements, even leaving little posies in my daughter’s bedroom sometimes.

Whenever I visit my mother now, which is almost every week, I follow the ritual. Just this weekend I made her a bouquet for the dinner table on Saturday night and a petite spray to bring her cheer by her window seat. I caught her more than once just breathing in their fragrance deeply and staring at them wistfully. Every blossom is a memory for her these days.

like roots extending

from jade green thumb to elbow,
his fingers troweled dark brown earth

my dad tilled, planted black seeds
teardrop bulbs mixed sunshine and rain
sending smiling blooms ever skyward

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A natural bouquet on the bush (Photo – Kath Abela Wilson)

Bouquet: Quotes and Credits

For Rocky Mountain writer Autumn Noelle Hall, poetry is a way of making sense of the senselessness of life, be it senseless violence or senseless beauty. Autumn believes much of the external suffering we witness in the world is a collective projection of unresolved individual suffering. She finds poetry provides a safe place for both holding and letting go of that suffering. Working with words helps Autumn to hear herself, and in doing so paves an inward path towards better understanding and acceptance of herself and her life experiences. Through this inner work, an outward path towards understanding and acceptance of the world and others appears. Speaking simultaneously from and to the heart, poetry is equally a form of protest and persuasion, reckoning and reconciliation, collaboration and creation. Autumn is grateful to the editors of Atlas Poetica, CHO, HT, Moonbathing, red lights, Ribbons and many other fine journals for making homes for her poems for over a decade.

Gary Blankenship is a sometimes poet known for long series based upon Walt Whitman, Wang Wei, the States and others. He also sends bouquets of roses daily to friends and the world at large wishing peace, love and joy.

Kathleen A. Lawrence was only six years old when first assigned the chore of collecting the flowers from her father’s garden for the family’s dinner table bouquet. She loved picking what months ago had just been a funny-shaped bulb she had helped trowel into the earth. She has been gathering flowers and saving moments in gardens ever since. She has written and published several haiku and abecedarians that reflect her perennially blossoming love of all things flower.

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♣ We welcome and encourage your response, especially in the form of a short poem, by leaving a comment below.

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