A Heart-full of Flower

For you, each night the wing-shaped flower
green claws filled with earth, round unblinking
eyes and purple forehead wrinkled veils of kiss-

how they worry you will miss them.

I, too every morning gratitude and fear he is
here beside me still.  Desperately, the heart
swims slowly to its darkened bottom, jagged like

a pebble in the soot.

Let grief remind me of the light-filled surface
when light is gone.  Let me be amazed the world
may touch, admire every flower then turn

its admiration to the stars whose fiery blossoms
illuminate the road to God, thrill and burst, a thousand
tiny fires fall to earth like winged-shaped flowers...

flowers you will miss.

Forgetting the Forgotten

It's not enough to know;  you must tell
the story of unopened boxes stuffed

with unopened treasures.  The smell
of everything new but forgotten like

the secret lives of wolves on some old
mountain.  They have been living there

for years without being seen or known.
I am telling you now because I hear them

crying in foreign tongues-  how fiercely
they love and kill as if their jaws have

tricked them, as if loving and killing
were the same beautiful becoming,

as if their secret desire to be understood
will somehow save them.