Good Intentions
‘Is it for a present?’ they said.
Their eyes warm with the thought,
they wrapped the flowers tenderly.
Clutching my huge cone of fancy paper
I walked past granite tombstones,
marble boxes full of weedless chippings,
urn-vases, stuck with posies made to measure,
here and there a potted geranium.
Torn from their wrappings
my great white lilies,
swans out of water,
sprawled on your new-made grave.
In an hour or two they’d rise ungainly,
on a freshening wind,
flap into odd corners of the churchyard,
sink under bushes
doing nothing to make you at home.
I stood beside your new turves,
the cracks between unhealed by summer grass,
the outline still a coffin.
I remembered my father buying you flowers
days before he left for good.
You didn’t like them.
The forgiving soil
will take back to itself
a litter of broken petals,
snapped stems.
Page(s) 13
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