Enough
To have held the late August zinnia
by its stiff stalk, watched petals unfold
until its whole romantic show opens
to the watchful bee, his yellow and black fur
sunning, wings whirring and waving.
To have been shocked by the hawk moth’s
bullet body; sleek, unreeling tongue
tracing pink phlox and purple monardia
as the month’s heated breath hovers
above and below scented blossoms.
To watch everyday daisies bloom up
from ground, assume the loose form
of sky-white, changing clouds among
the aster’s wild blue, the silvery altitude.
To walk through the orchard; snap apples
at their stems, share the shine with dusk’s
familiar does and darling fawns;
to call back the long-ago, happy planting day.
It is enough, isn’t it, to have lived—
to have leaned in to the sun-struck zinnia,
the coneflower, shapely bleeding heart;
to inhale them all—and the wren,
singing the shamble, the tangle of summer,
the path to travel when all this is over.
BERTHA ROGERS’s poems have been published in journals and anthologies and in several collections, among them the forthcoming What Want Brings: New & Selected Poems (Salmon, 2023). Read more.