Thursday 1 January 2015

A poem by Leo Vroman (1915-2014)


Flowers

If everyone turned all at once to flowers
they would be large-sized flowers with trailing whiskers.
Emaciated flies, dead beetles
would end entangled in their hairs.
Toothpicks, surreptitiously sprouted
would swell into turned table-legs,
buds of cotton would burst open
into plush hearts that smelled of fringes,

And on the mountains plaster pillars stand
weeping spates of plaster grapes.

Cardboard leaves would drift upon the water,
The butterflies fall apart into loose wings
And all the flowerbeds shrivel up with scent
If everyone turned all at once to flowers.

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