I Will Take Flowers

You must know the ways of flowers,

to recognize their kind.

Like people, they are mysterious and varied.

Unlike people...they reveal themselves.

There are the Blazing stars here,

they only come out in the afternoon.

I'm not sure he or she will ever come out.

There are the tiny ground hugging kind

with myriad red tipped petals...

could pass for clover blossom,

 yet...they are not.

 They bunch up like bundlers

 from a tv ad,

 and may only be found...

tightly clustered

at the side of our house

in a four inch space...and no other.

The blue stars...

close by one another but not mated...

individual in their sameness...

lovely in their candor.

There are the ones I call 'old fashioned',

pretty in an early American sense...

a hundred white petaled midgets on each stem,

communal, the color of homemade vanilla ice cream.

These are some of the surprises in our yard.

Of people, I know little, if anything.

They deceive...they lie...

they pretend to be what they are not.

 I cannot define them,

 because I can never know the real them...

animals...

people are not animals...

people are god's

who ornately fabricate

to hide themselves...

who never come out

from behind what they truly are.

I will take flowers over god's any day.

I will take animals...

whose serious and funny

and childlike faces contain depths,

unlike that I have ever found in god's...

I will take flowers.


Written By Bruce James Clyde 2016...Deming, New Mexico

Photo Credit: Unknown, Desert wildflowers