Sonia brought me the scraggly
green stems from her garden.
“Celandine poppy,” she said.
“Blooms a pretty yellow.”
I was skeptical.
“Plant them,” she insisted.
The poor things flopped over
when I placed them in the ground.
I didn’t expect them to last the night,
much less perk up so quickly, lifting
hand-shaped leaves toward the sun.
People or plants.
I can never tell who will thrive
and who will wither.
My therapist suggests a mantra:
“You have no predictive powers.”
She thinks meditative repetition
will be calming
through my husband’s chemo.
It could be.
But not like standing
at my patio door seeing
those scraggly stems
grow strong in my backyard.
Jacqueline Jules is the author of Manna in the Morning (Kelsay Books, 2021), Itzhak Perlman's Broken String, winner of the 2016 Helen Kay Chapbook Prize from Evening Street Press, and Smoke at the Pentagon: Poems to Remember (Bushel & Peck, 2023). Her poetry has appeared in over 100 publications. Visit www.jacquelinejules.com
Beautifully sad and hopeful!
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