They come in airy flotillas
on each stem, little flower-
blimps, propellers
of petals at their back ends,
which makes me think
how heavy with history
we are, and how alone, thus forgivably
prone to personification
of the gods.
We imagine the little bladders puffing
themselves out because of
their excellent
and homeopathic ideas, the barely
earthbound kind that no one
takes seriously
until they save the world.
Every story we tell is only
Horatio Alger, a pale,
yellowish and ordinary boy
at the end of the row
in junior high, who finally
amounts to something. A surprise,
a profusion of campion,
to demonstrate that
after the guns, the tanks,
the barbed-wire we wanted
so desperately to avoid
in our story, blooms will spread
back across like plain,
kind words.