Kerre Davison
Perennials
The children down the street
are neither busy being born
nor busy dying, and I am gathering
dried petals like scabs in my hand.
Already they have lost
their honeyed funeral scent,
hushed solemn and chemical as my fingers
curl around them.
At two, my brother’s son
taught us the meaning of accident,
stepped unseen into the backwards
path of his mother’s car.
Double-edged loss
covered with earth and smooth
granite. Spring blades
green again each year.
If you can cultivate history
from a handful of seeds, you have
an anthology of human hope. All I have
is this theory of flowers, why
they are so hard to bear.
Some say it is enough to know
exactly when to cast aside
each bud that never opens.
I say it is enough to hear
the thousand subterranean pains
of a mother’s cry. To know the last
time she held that child, he was neither
a beginning nor an end, his voice a stone
in a river, the dark crimson bloom
of his head. The way she held him
as though she had been given a rare gift
she could not possibly accept.
