daisies, Poetry by Jesús B Otxoa

Genre: Death

daisies
by Jesús B Otxoa

para cristina † 1953

were i to briefly peer into the distant past, say, into those
long ago and vanished years, i’d mind the purple larkspur
standing sentinel over the creeping pink verbena lovely
in my mind’s eye only to be taken to the moment, yesterday?
where i’d be cradling in hand and arm a loaded
m1 carbine and standing at the ready
on the destroyer escort’s ladder staring hard at the swells
among which sailors swam, safe in their belief and faith
that sharks would not intrude. now, as memory recedes

i mind that yes, i have grown some lovely flowers
in my time, blood red roses and feral bougainvillea,
bachelors’ buttons, vexing sweet peas, nasturtiums,
daffodils and all the rest, fragrant jewels from the breast
of mother earth but it has been the daisies
we have ever tasked to tie it all together, lovely
daisies that i place beside the headstone, for you left,
never to truly let me know if it was worth the candle
and it wasn’t yesterday but 1952, when holding that rifle

and willing the sharks not to appear that i could not
have foreseen how quickly time would pass, how today
would fast become the yesterdays that haunt my waking
hours, how all the tomorrows would quickly fade into
poorly recalled memories, even those recent
memories that age makes difficult to fetch
and reconsider, did those things really happen, was i
so inept to let the moment pass?, who were we back
then to ask a flower whose silent petals white we invested

with temporary proxied speech, she loves me, he loves me not,
she loves me, what more could you have done, what more
could i have done, what more could we have done that either
failed to do? how was it that one is left alone to trespass back
to time long past, time become an unwelcome present
that memory can no longer fully tender, dreams lost
among the flowers that can no longer bloom, flowers that
imagination can no longer hold, flowers of absurd colors come
to assault the mind, flowers that are here but truly never were?

© 2014 Jesús B Otxoa

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