Wildflowers 💐🌸🌿🌾

I found them growing where I stopped to rest,

Along a road that used to lead somewhere,

The stubborn flowers nobody plants or tends,

That come up through the gravel every year.

💐🌸🌿🌾

I knew their names once, chicory and vetch,

The yarrow standing straight in its own way,

The casual knowing that a boy picks up

From walking the same holler every day.

💐🌸🌿🌾

A man could pass them over easily,

His mind on what the upper field might yield,

And never stop to reckon what it costs

To overlook a thing that will not kneel.

💐🌸🌿🌾

They do not care for my appreciation.

That much I've learned from standing here.

The ox-eye daisy has its own direction,

The ironweed its own particular song.

💐🌸🌿🌾

I've heard it said that wildness is a fault,

That what volunteers itself should be cut down.

I've broken enough ground to know the difference

Between a thing that's lost and one that's found.

💐🌸🌿🌾

Come August they will brown off at the stalk

The way that everything in time must do,

And by October you would never know

That all of this had happened or had been true.

💐🌸🌿🌾

And yet I find myself reluctant still

To leave this roadside for the walk ahead,

As if by standing here I might determine

What it is that living means, or said.