A garland crowns the garden refuse,
Surviving on its funeral pyre,
A bride's bouquet on her mother's grave,
Fragile beauty difficult to bear.
The other trees stand weeping,
In the aftermath of your hatchet job,
Amputees, sad casualties of war,
Raw and unloved.
Silent, I watch from bedroom windows,
Resigned to this annual clearing.
My twitching white lace curtains
Signify surrender.
At last, decapitated trees fight back,
Green buds appear from splintered sides,
Beads of sweat squeeze through,
Exhausted limbs.
Yet there can be no second coming
For this rootless blossom,
Tissue petals already turning brown
In mournful Easter showers.
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I hope you’ll forgive my presumption in posting a comment, since we haven’t met and you clearly know much more about poetry than I do. However, the bottom line is I really liked Blossom and it got better the more I read it – always a good sign.
ReplyDeleteI particularly liked verses 2 and 4; the imagery is very vivid, conjured by the choice of strong nouns. There is (it seems to me) commendable economy of expression – adjectives reduced to a minimum. The extended death/war/butchery metaphor gives the whole poem cohesion and unity.
Just two nit-picks:
The ‘your’ in v2 raised expectations of conflict/resentment (husband/neighbour?) which weren’t followed up or resolved in any way.
I can’t put my finger on it but the line ‘Fragile beauty difficult to bear’ doesn’t work for me. Somehow seems weak and ineffectual along side the rest of the poem.
Trefor