Thoughts about a flower. |
Tiger Lily Tiger lilies everywhere, marking highway margins, smudging rocky crags with wild, petalled fire. They spread through moving fields, waving lazily with the goldenrod and the fringed blue aster. There’s something arresting in the way they move; something charming in the common nature of their grace. Orange day lilies, flora in the ditch, lets the dead all around them, come back to life; Lazarus flowers breathing deeply and proudly, under an unforgiving July sun. Cultured to smell roses, and instructed to fawn over the pristine sister-orchid, I shyly admire them and their savage comeliness, coveting that which would surely seem unbefitting behind closed doors. Desperate to ease the ache to pluck and snatch them from the soil in which they thrive, I look away, thinking it wise and believing myself humane. I dismiss them and their simple beauty knowing it is easier than to watch them die in in the indulgence of unwilling captivity. To prop them up, in a yawning, white porcelain vase, free from those elements and the wrath of the seasons, will only help them to wither and vanish, roaring softly as they go. The vase rests empty and the day goes on. |