This Year's Flowers

        by Marc Pollitt

There once was a wild place here, full of tall and hearty weeds
and brush and sharp-thorned plants that shouted, "Stay away!"
Now the ground is bare, and smoothed, and dust-beaten,
oil-stained from dripping pans slung beneath colossal yellow
and orange construction machines. Some lumber and a homely trailer
are all that stay here any more, but nobody lives within.

The brush rabbits don't care much for the new wobble-top
chain link fence that closes off this once-wild place. They can
get through, or under, or between the bars on the twenty-foot
gate, but there's nothing for them inside. Nothing except
open ground with no cover to hide from hawks
during the day or owls after the coolness of night has come.

The scorpions don't mind; neither do the ants and beetles.
To them, one place is fairly much as good as the next.
And some few straggling weeds are still trying to sustain
the spirit of the once-wild place. They grip dry soil alongside the fence,
near the concrete walkway and the paved road, and though
few and small and sparse, they bloom with this year's flowers.

 

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