Within her green garden, our hedged veranda
filled with buckets of lilies, sweet herb pockets,
a sunburnt chandelier dimming in the breeze—
Our garden with hydrangeas, and thistle vines,
and azaleas in phantom fuchsias, though
if only we could still sew posy wreaths.
Rings around Margaret, May forgotten petals
to help settle her tummy. Glad, then
perhaps she could water back the seeds.
Margaret sits in the mourning, and so I join her
birdwatching, among the soft plot’s dying green,
the nightshade she’d madly weed.
Days when it rains, we sip white jasmine tea, steep
it with cannabis oils, honeys and summer leaves,
poperies, perhaps her secret dried poppies.
Across our canopy, the sad salt wound of away;
seas, Margaret and me, growing crooked under day—
below the drapings of fall’s leaves,
Margaret can’t feel winter in me, and I think
she quit watering what already died. But come spring
she might breathe back alive— free, reborn at peace.
Photo Credit: narghee-la Flickr via Compfight cc
