Poetry and Writes

A Flower Bends (WRITE)

*A five-minute write. Include the sentence A FLOWER BENDS IN THE BREEZE OF MYSELF.*

A flower bends in the breeze of myself. The wind rushes through me, twisting my hair and turning the tides. Ambulances wail from their depths in the waves, human culture bedewed by fears of pitch, fears of bait, fears of hooks and roadside paths.

A foot stomps the bracken, a flower grows in its way, branching and forking and crying out:

Look what I have done, I have hatched from the black egg of the viper, and the tale has blossomed. Look at me, magenta in the dust, magenta in the underleaf green.

A rower sets his paddles against the floor of his boat. He stands and widens his sunburned arms, widens them like the blossoming flower, and lets himself fall into the churned water, the churned footpath where the flower grew, where the breeze bent it, and where the dark caverns of woe dew the mirrored earth.

Yes, the flower grew from the seed of a shell, the viper's egg, deep within the roils of the ground, deep below the withering hostas and floating cottonwood spores, that little roadside path haunted by the echoes of the freeway, the same freeway taken by the man in the boat.

And while he flails in the water before he stills, he sees music. He sees a viper, a hatching egg, a flare of red then a flare of orchid tinged ephemeral white. He sees glittering caverns and a tall tree, the tallest tree of the sunken earth, branching and forking and crying out beneath the soil, and he feels the crushed flower sent like a prayer, he feels it bloom within himself, he feels it die within himself, and his life along with it.

The flowers erupt into fields, long layered fields of white and yellow, laced with green plumage and hindered by a bright blue sky. And the flowers bend in the breeze of the earth.