11:04:17

Today’s prompt  was to try a Bop poem – a form strict on lines and refrains. This was less painful than expected.

 

If flowers could drown themselves
this would be the day to do it:
how downward that fat sky must look
from underneath. How unhappy. See, even the birds
swim away from it, even the swifts, who sink
endless circles in its great blue fog are gone.

When the wind drops its accent, everything stops to listen.

The baby cries again. The baby is also fat:
four months old, taken to storing the rich
blue milk under his pelt of smooth skin;
Delicious! So edible! in murmuration; even the midwives
twitter between themselves as they undress the baby
from his cloud of clothes and weigh him
on the handsome scales. He squirms pink
and uncovered. His mouth opens blue as an earthworm.

When the wind drops its accent, everything stops to listen.

One night I go out barehanded and behead
the dahlias and lupines, the poppies and the peonies;
I curtail the rosebush of every starry promise. The garden
holds a precise kind of quiet. The sky is the right shade
of dark, and the baby sleeps on peacefully inside, warm
under the plump blanket of everything I have to give him.

When the wind drops its accent, everything stops to listen.

 

Picture credit: From A Floral Fantasy in an Old English Garden. Walter Crane c.1899