Overlook

 

Halloween tomorrow

and the gerbera daisy 

planted in May makes

its first appearance—

I think I’ll write a poem

about it, how for some of us

it is almost too late when

we decide to bloom

like this gerbera daisy

facing the faint light,  heedless,

just like Aesop’s cricket.

Next day the frost doesn’t

come and the poem doesn’t either

and that gerbera daisy, its pink head held high,

blooms, flattening its petals for full-face exposure.

I pull dead impatiens and coleus from

the pot and the daisy stands straighter, 

spreads it green dandelion-like leaves.

Another one peeps from below,

charmed like a snake dancing,

and the poem is about second chances;

how it’s better to have one week in November

than none at all — the whole

better to have loved and lost thing

without the love part, with just the part about 

hard scrabble existence in a clay pot.

Sometimes it works out okay, 

that’s what the poem would say,

blithe and happy as one can be considering death.

Veterans Day and the two daisies

seem happy as weeds.  

A ladybug I flick off the edge of the pot 

does not fly away but arcs to the deck with gravitas.  

I’ll take the flower in, I think, 

re-plant it to winter in my temperate home.

First I’ll decontaminate it in the garage

then re-pot it, and it’ll soldier on.

Now the poem is about how sometimes 

we need to be rescued and sometimes we are.

The plant will flourish as the family’s floral pet;

maybe this should be like a children’s tale—

The Little Engine, The Ugly Duckling, 

The Castaway Toy—happy endings all.

Every time I park my car I remind

myself to take care of that plant.

But there’s never any time

and soon it withers between

its dismal companions: a bag of charcoal and gardening shoes.  

Come Christmas, I need room to hide the presents

and store the party supplies, so I do one last cleanup

and unceremoniously dump the pot

into the closest patch of earth.

The soil is a clump of roots

and drainage stones, and the empty pot

goes on the shelf with the others—

its space on the floor now taken up 

by a six of Stella.

This poem is more likely now, more like life.

The plant got a couple days in the sun—  

not enough—and the promise of something better—

not fulfillment—and it ends up dead and recycled;

a plot that is truer to the organic nature of

of any plant’s story. We all die.

Some have summers

and others a final gasp in November.

Sometimes the gardener is benevolent,

sometimes not.

 

Trained as a journalist, Ellen Wade Beals writes poetry and prose. Read more.


“Overlook” was first published in The Stony Thursday Book: A Collection of Contemporary Poetry.

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