We watch them fall.
We pick them,
knowing
in the picking
we have already seen
the last blooms
fading out,
parchment dry
in the mind’s eye.
But we pick them,
all the same.
We pick them,
knowing that
everything picked
is brief
as the day’s light,
come and gone
to grief, too quick,
too soon.
So we watch them fall.
And the vase becomes
a memorial.
The petals a stain of red,
of white
that’s lost its shine.
And reverie, a thing
to keep us
from removing the remnants.
But we still pick them,
suckers for love.
We pick them,
knowing
in the picking
we have already seen
the last blooms
fading out,
parchment dry
in the mind’s eye.
We pick them,
knowing that
everything picked
is brief
as the day’s light,
come and gone
to grief, too fast,
too soon.
So we watch them fall.
And the vase becomes
a memorial.
Ana Lisa de Jong
Living Tree Poetry
June 2020
Living Tree Poetry 
love wrapped into its own transience
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Couldn’t have said that better myself, thank you Ananda.
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Truly moving.
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Thank you so much for reading my little blog, the posting here so out of date that I am still posting what I wrote 6 months ago 🙂
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That gives me a lot to consider and ponder… I like to bring Denise flowers and we enjoy their beauty… but it fades. So does the beauty of the unpicked flowers… yet they reveal beauty and even hope as we await their return in the spring and summer in the Northern hemisphere.
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I think its the transient things that are the most beautiful and poignant for their very transience! Love flowers, and this summer continue putting our Hibiscus flowers in a vase even though they only last a day. I think when I wrote this it was sort of an analogy about love and the commitment we make to it even though we know its brief in the scheme of things.
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The brevity is so precious and so sad.
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