Your stem is crooked — your head will fall
without help.  Your neighbour crosses your path
but lends no support.

You must be the only broken thing.

Why?

What hurt you? Did anything hurt you at all? If I could look in the past
Read you like a story
Satisfy the curiosity
— Did you snap
under the weight of a visitor? Or
Is your crown too heavy? Was life too kind; It let you grow fat and happy.
Was life too harsh and you begged for everything on the chance you’d get something at all,
until you had enough, and suddenly found you didn’t know how to stop begging?

There’s no story to read.
I walk away
and don’t think of you

until I’m writing a poem about daisies, and I walk
the same road I’ve walked every day
before — in my mind, in the dark of
my room, with bare feet
wearing a comfortable day dress to bed
because I don’t want to do laundry — and I remember you
I remember spotting you because you were different and
Oh, what a shame: this one is broken
unlike all the others
I had no rush so I stopped and looked
But there was nothing else to see so I kept walking.

This time I do not walk away.
I stop and look
and I think of you,
The broken Shasta Daisy, taller than all the others digging through the pavement
— you will fall further than them all, and you were the only one worth knowing.