Monday, July 28, 2014

Tuesday Poem: From The Water Series



Snowdrop Soup

is what Luna serves him.
She forages and all she can
find is these, with their little
white heads and greeny secrets.

Months of being cooped up
in their too tiny space,
inundated with snow, after
heavy wet ice, after hailstone
and rain, wind whipping
beneath the floorboards, stilts
rattling a rough tattoo.

There were shriveled carrots
and mildewed beets left,
to throw in with a brackish
draw from the well, her
put-ups all but decimated.

She spies them at her feet,
clusters of early March milk maids,
a first flowering, stoop-shouldered
and shy above the sooty patches of melt.

A gift, she thinks, from the angels,
for ain’t she like Eve almost? Needing
a little swig of the hope, after
losing so much that was good?

Too late she remembers their other name:
death’s flower, so beautiful were they,
once she clipped them, like mermaid’s
hair drifting across the bowl.

He gobbled them fast, and she did too,
so craving of green were they, and then
the cramps and the stomach flips set in,
the two of them dizzy as love sick fools.
Giddy, he says, with spring just round the bend.
Their guts will mend, since at least she
remembered to leave bulb in the ground.
She doesn’t tell him the story. Maybe
next year. Pictures how hard their
empty bellies will shake when they laugh.

2 comments:

AJ Ponder said...

Love this, very portentious, there's nothing like weaving old legends into the new :)

Michelle Elvy said...

Nice early spring poem -- and I love the ending, the way she can imagine their jolly bellies. This has a great mood, with small details peeking through.