Daffodil Day
The day after my brother told me he was dying―it was a Monday,
I walked into the office and found the Cancer Society
had delivered their identical bouquets to our identical desks,
tepals packed tight over the closed-up coronas,
naked stems standing in a stationary wobble in the wide mouths
of those waterless blue vases, the ones that came “free”
with a fifteen-dollar donation. I rushed over, cut away the rubber
bands that bound their stems, fetched the water,
stirred in those little medicinal packets of plant sweetness.
At five o’clock, I abandoned them to their separate cubicles.
But when I arrived the next day, I won’t say they had risen―
not quite that, but their little coronal trumpets blared out
that yellow effulgence they’re famous for. Even severed from
their roots, from the rich bed of soil they were born to,
even left in the stale fluorescent light that filled our morning
room, they bloomed for me. They bloomed.
Jeanne Wagner is the author of four full-length collections: The Zen Piano-Mover, which won the NFSPS Poetry Prize, In the Body of Our Lives, published by Sixteen Rivers Press, Everything Turns Into Something Else, runner-up for the Grayson Book Prize and, most recently, One Needful Song, winner of the 2024 Catamaran Poetry Prize. Read more.