Day 11: A Five Senses Poem

Wednesday Morning

Cool, smooth hand in mine;
how is it that she is still
so little, when her world
gets bigger every day,
and her personality is
as huge as the sun?

At our front door we see
a big, orange box that holds
a double stroller for our
upstairs neighbors, two
women who are about to be
two moms for two babies,
one boy and one girl.

In my left ear, I hear
my one little girl prattle
in her customary way
about how maybe she
can baby-sit these twins
once she’s 10 or 11, or
in her “late teens.”

We cross the busy street,
stop to sniff an early lilac
fooled by the good weather
last month; now its scent
is tamped down by the cold.

My mouth holds a hint
of coffee, masked by
Colgate’s finest; this is
the taste of a school day
when I drop her off
on the playground so
she can walk through
a big door, into a life
other than my own.

Day 3: A Wedding

Hydrangea

You are not my favorite flower.
I am about native plants, fragrance,
pollinators. You are fussy, foreign,
have no scent. And yet you are

a wedding as giddy as any I’ve ever
been to, enormous heads of pink and blue
on one plant, as long as there is, around
your roots, a marriage of acid soil and basic.

You unite the earth. You express it in color.
Pink blooms and blue, your salute to summer
and, I suppose, to love—I know my eyes
love you in spite of the rest of me.

Sometimes, too, you bloom in purple.
Then I think the earth around you is so
mixed, it can no longer be separated;
the two have become one flesh. Yours.