Grow wild
Grow free
Mowed down again
Controlled by what tears you down
Try to fertilize
Pollinate
Cannot stop the blades

Completing the Pattern
by Michael R. Burch

Walk with me now, among the transfixed dead
who kept life’s compact and who thus endure
harsh sentence here—among pink-petaled beds
and manicured green lawns. The sky’s azure,
pale blue once like their eyes, will gleam blood-red
at last when sunset staggers to the door
of each white mausoleum, to inquire—
"What use, O things of erstwhile loveliness?"

Keywords/Tags: death, sentence, dead, cemetery, graveyard, mausoleum, corpses, manicured, lawn, flowers, pink, petals, blue, sky, red, sunset

My misgivings hide among the shadows,
In the tangle of long grass along the hedgerow
Between your wide open fields and my cultivated lawn.

Unspoken truths crowd out the spring bulbs,
Now snarled with weeds and thorned with blackberry,
The cobbled pathway which once linked my hope with your promise.

Will you meet me at the gate by the old sycamore tree?
If yes, then bring your dreams, untethered, and the dappled autumn sunshine,
I will bring my careful notions and the soft spring rain.

Prim roses and wild lilac; a velvet ash and sweet chestnuts,
Your gypsy summer, my redbud winter,
Our season, one garden.

She smiles at me,
baring twenty teeth and thousand arms,
towering in the grass.

Round her crowds men - spokes of men,
eyeing and climbing for her youth
Young and fearless her children are,
and so is she,
locking her steel-coated arms
tight on her children.

Les they be careful
the sun will shine on their homes
and Spring will take them away -
cajole with his sweet talk,
lead with his loud mouth.
Four by four, the blossomed children
leave their mother, who
doesn't hear a word.

On river banks and narrow creeks,
on closing books and lovers' looks,
on baskets and gardens,

the powdered children will soar and
their mother will be waiting
where they are.