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Heirlooms planted
more than forty years ago
to celebrate this home,
I still tend them.
For their brief season,
beige and burgundy blossoms
fill my largest vases.
After a storm
dozens lie ravished
on the lawn.
Harvesting the fallen
to liven my bouquets,
I trade bare stalks for full,
rearranging, clip spent flowers.
New blooms cleave
to their withered sisters,
as the living
cling to the dead,
and I must gentle them away
under the mute scrutiny
of fresh yellow tongues.
This poem first appeared in U.S. 1 Worksheets (Vol. 53, 2008).
Used here with the author’s permission.
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Kathe L. Palka lives in Hunterdon County, New Jersey and writes in both Japanese forms and free verse. Her short tanka collection, As the Years Pass, won an eChapbook Award from Snapshot Press in 2011. In 2015, Red Moon Press published A Path of Desire, a book of tan renga written by Kathe and poet Peter Newton. Two poems from her long form collection, Miracle of the Wine (Grayson Books, 2012), were featured on The Writer’s Almanac. Kathe is a member of the Haiku Poets of the Garden State and has been involved in the presentation of haiku for their yearly April haiku sign installation at the New Jersey Botanical Garden in Ringwood, New Jersey since its inception in 2018. She has co-edited the online micro poetry journal tinywords.com together with Peter Newton since 2012. Kathe is currently at work on a manuscript in Japanese forms. Learn more about her at her Haiku Foundation web page.
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wendy morton:
our own brief season, a powerful metaphor, these irises.
Posted 03/29/2011 11:37 AM
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dotief@comcast.net:
I love "gentle them away." Nice.
Posted 03/29/2011 08:04 AM
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