Flowering
For Liza’s Birthday
What mirrors of the sky burst from scraggly lines
Whose only end seems to be to smother walls
And bushes in a radiant tangle of forked vines,
Erupting here and there in waterfalls
Of blossoms, whose lambent purpose seems
To be more blossoms, the flash and blaze
Of petals, the inflorescent gleams
And dazzle of the palm grove maze,
The flowering, effulgent haze
That forms, in shambles and in mire,
The idle nights and rich bouquets
To which all growing seeds aspire.
April 4th–6th, 2023
Kailua
Explanation
Rather than just recreating their own kind, I like the thought that flowers (and people) are inspired by light to rise to the occasion with inflorescence, with whatever color they have the talent or desperation to summon. As in the spring young men turn to thoughts of love, or as on a warm spring day surfers crave the surf, or beach bums crave the sand, so plants want to celebrate the new season with fireworks, and poets with whichever words can produce a rebirth of language, a reincarnation of warmth and humanity.
Our children are the inflorescences, the instinctive upwelling, of our love, born of light, as Liza was born in the spring.
Science posits that the point of flowers is to give birth to more flowers, which is a way of saying that we don’t really know the point of flowers. Which may give me the license of making up my own reasons for flowers: beauty, light, and poetry.
I notice that my poems spring from emotional roots which are often then mixed up with specific observations and scientific theories. So behind the scenes, this is a poem about vernalization, the need of plants for a period of cold dormancy in order to flower, even in the tropics. Poets have a lot in common with vulnerable flowers. They both need to putter, to lounge around, before the vegetative radiance of the spring aggregates them into lustrous jungles.
Both roots and fruits are provoked by light (and by cold). Like people, they need to gestate. Like crops, they bloom in the spring, in the season of light. Light activates a metabolism called florigen in the leaves of a plant, which in turn stimulates the meristem, the core, the DNA, which divides cells in the tips of leaves. Those cells explode into flowers. If the cells are at the base of the plant, they become roots. So flowers are roots which seek not water, but heat, in the form of light. Plants grow at both ends, seeking contrary ends.
This is a sonnet, without its couplet zinger, as recently I’ve been feeling that I can dispense with the moral; the descriptive aspects of a poem are enough.
Cathy points out that it has a lot of similarities with another poem I wrote for Liza, “A Second Opinion.”