Roger Elkin
Tiger Lilies
Given he preferred his younger daughter
you would have thought
Dad ought to have liked lilies;
but in his machismo world they were dismissed
as silly frilly things: upstart fillies.
How he despised their plump bulbs’ anaemic flesh,
their waxlike feel, their basal scales splintering
like broken baby-nails.
He liked reviling
their spiralling stems with leaves
whorling to heads in fecundities of bud;
those exotic blooms - luscious, prolific -
that broke to elegant-petalled stars, their inviting
apertures, their slippery feel. He hated them.
On top of which, their festering scent,
their pollen - bloodily-smudging fingers/clothes -
meant there was no handling them:
by far too feminine for him.
Their legginess needing reining back.
How dare they commandeer attention,
reigning over borders from shady corners
under dappled sun? It was all too much.
Putting them down,
he trampled their neat leaves to sappy string,
their blooms to scrappy rags, and chop-chipped
the bulbs to thins of skin. They’d never get
the better of him.
And to think, in later years,
that ‘little’ sister, preferring gravel to plants,
hissingly dismisses them:
Stinking things; those lilies!
So much for favourites.
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