The May flowers in my yard baptized by April
showers have endured
June, but one by one they submit to July’s all-consuming,
green.  The lilacs were the first to go, their honeyed
ambrosia too heavenly for a humble
bricked-in bed.  The roses, once crowned with ruby
petals, have balded to paltry stems
bowing beneath sun’s heat.  The peonies
shed their boisterous blossoms, now only blackened
shreds so delicate a finger’s brush could disintegrate their shriveled
softness.  A few valiant primroses
speckle my front garden, but even they wilt.  I inhale their citrus-
steeped earl grey scent, so I can memorialize their sweet perfume.

Poetry is a flower that buds but does not wither.  It does not languish
without June’s nourishing soil, though July’s loam is not so fertile;  it sprouts
elsewhere, in pockmarked
pages, long car rides, listless
clouds, sparkling sunbeams, tinkling
laughter, streetlamps so ornately carved they murmur of otherwordly
forges.  While I wait for next Spring’s bloom, I will find
poetry blossoming in every vacated
sidewalk crack because poetry
is our most resilient perennial,
inexorable, ineffable.