The Daffodil's Lament

We live like flowers

Sprouting like seeds

Inside our mothers

Growing up from nothing.

Some have the advantage

Of soil, and care, and rain

While others lack the privlege,

Growing in the cracks of sidewalks.

Beneath the feet of a world too busy.

Too busy to notice, to love, to see.

But we grow anyway, against all odds.

Knowing that our lives are finite.

Seed, to plant, to blossom, to mulch.

Only one purpose left for us.

Nurturing the seeds we left behind

With what used to be our bodies.

Or maybe we get plucked,

Before the cycle is over,

Placed in an arrangement,

Among our colorful sisterhood,

Held in glass

Choked with water

A slow, and strangling death

All for the sake of a beauty

We are but do not experience.

I had always yearned for the vase,

A dream of plucking myself,

Of dying beautiful but pointless

Snipping myself above the roots,

To be remembered fondly

Perhaps have my petals pressed between

Pages of a beloved book

Forgotten, and passed on.

To be discovered by new hands at the turning of a page.

But I see the folly of this now.

The ill-fated planning of my demise.

I would know death either way,

But one comes from my will

The other comes from the nature that guides us.

I am a fickle creature,

Full of whims and wants,

Desires yearned for with intensity for an instant

Only to be just as quickly forgotten.

So perhaps I am awake enough now,

To trust nature, more than myself.

I have bad judgment,

And it is always she, who makes the rain.

If she wishes me to be mulch,

To feed the seeds that come after

Then I will be as she commands.

My will is no match for nature,

My nature is no match for her will.

I will grow old.

I will wither.

My petals will fall.

I will slump, and brown,

Sinking back to the earth which raised me.

In order to choose myself,

I will not pick myself.

I will grow old,

For her.