The SOUTH ORANGE COUNTY COMMUNITY COLLEGE DISTRICT — "[The] blog he developed was something that made the district better." - Tim Jemal, SOCCCD BoT President, 7/24/23
Sunday, May 29, 2011
Rebel Girl's Poetry Corner: "who knows what the earth's in the mood to eat"
The semantics of flowers on Memorial Day
by Bob Hicok
Historians will tell you my uncle
wouldn't have called it World War II
or the Great War plus One or Tombstone
over My Head. All of this language
came later. He and his buddies
knew it as get my ass outta here
or fucking trench foot and of course
sex please now. Petunias are an apology
for ignorance, my confidence
that saying high-density bombing
or chunks of brain in cold coffee
even suggests the athleticism
of his flinch or how casually
he picked the pieces out.
Geraniums symbolize secrets
life kept from him, the wonder of
variable-speed drill and how
the sky would have changed had he lived
to shout it’s a girl. My hands
enter dirt easily, a premonition.
I sit back on my uncle’s stomach
exactly like I never did, he was
a picture to me, was my father
looking across a field at wheat
laying down to wind. For a while,
Tyrants’ War and War of World Freedom
and Anti-Nazi War skirmished
for linguistic domination. If
my uncle called it anything
but too many holes in too many bodies
no flower can say. I plant marigolds
because they came cheap and who knows
what the earth’s in the mood to eat.
*
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2 comments:
They're the Aztec funerary flower! Check them out on all those day of the dead altars!
You've done it again, RG. Thanks for introducing us to yet another wonderful poem.
It makes sense to me that marigolds are a funerary flower. I love their bitter, trenchant scent. People plant them in Montana (and no doubt in many other places) because they are a deterrent to deer. They are strong, no-nonsense flowers, but gorgeous nonetheless.
MAH
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