Season of Ubiquitous Flowers

You didn’t think it possible,
after the fact, after the white
sheet had been drawn squarely
across her face, after the blankets
knitted before her birth were folded
in a single remembrance drawer,
that the seeds you’d sown last
month (almost the cruellest)
would dare push through the soil
like fistfuls of soldiers rising
from a ghost-racked trench.
You’d finally succumbed
to growing flowers as well as
vegetables, tending to the soul
alongside the stomach, and how
they didn’t disappoint – cosmos
and cornflower, mallow and
marigolds, snapdragon, poppies,
white mist of baby’s breath,
jaunty carousel of players opening
their child-like faces to the sun,
flaunting their hues like champagne,
their confident bearing of calyx
and pistil. This was the season
of ubiquitous flowers. Flowers
through the post, a bouquet
so ample you had to wedge
its stems into the matronly carriage
of a sauerkraut crock. Lilies trailing
their obscene orange pollen
across a hearse ceiling. Bluebells
you sat amongst the day you
returned from hospital without her,
bluebells on her grave the gang
of lambs munched on before
you’d even put the trowel away.
Her name, Sayuri, little lily.
How unfathomable in the mouths
of nurses and carers, how adamantly
its own world, white petals origami-d
as lantern cradling its singular light.