exuberant flowers!

the kingdom of plants, celebrates

paths call to me:

a destination of a waterfall

and the wonderfully trying aerobics it will take to get there,

a price of effort, breath, and sweat

that my body

that my psyche

need to pay

so that I can keep being present,

today the waterfall and deep green pool were grand,

and I loved the effort to have gotten there,

I earned the cake, but I glory in the icing,

it’s early April and flower after flower

rushes to be true to itself and the future

and scatter themselves like jewels along the trail,

yellow trillium everywhere, and a few white trillium for contrast,

violets and chickweed, white phacelia like a young snow,

a few glorious dwarf iris as preview for the future,

a few bloodroot leaves to remind us of the recent past,

today, though, mostly magenta geranium and phacelia,

the sedate geranium we have known for years,

and phacelia with masses of purple flowers

loving to give us their all,

the next day the flowers are even more luxuriant,

particularly the wild ginger,

she of the velvet-smooth leaves, 

each round and light in their green,

while below, a maroon flower with tapering petals,

narrowing to a point,

surround a center that can be seen and appreciated

only as a supplicant on the ground before it,

I seek to hold it and remember it with my photos,

the phacelia today overwhelms me in its masses,

and overwhelms me when I take my camera close

and realize the lacy perfection of each individual petal,

as midday approaches swarms of other people

climb up the valley in pursuit of revelation freely given,

as the kingdom of plants and people celebrate together.

by Henry H. Walker

April 9, ’15