Finally the roses blossomed,
Tall on spiked spindles,
Late in the season,
As did our son,
Without announcement
And without reason.
We condo gardened
Thin condo strips of clay
Along the poured slab walk,
Fertilizing with compost and manure,
Rotating pots toward the sunny day.
At first the roses prolifically
In eager robbing of soil
Unruly grew, magic colors on wands,
Thorns soft and green,
The enthusiasm of the new;
But then for two years, trimming hard,
Spines gnarled resistant.
We despaired for beauty
And our garden lost.
Roses meanly swayed
In overgrowth in the wind
And soured with caked mildew.
We left the garden,
Retreated, resigned,
To potting old-fashioned gardenias,
While our roses sulked.
Beaten by the garden riot,
We watched passively through windows,
Decried the wildness we couldn't restrain.
So what silent moment
The color in the stalk enthralled
And drove upon the leaves the bloom?
We could not know,
Knowing only
As in defiance of causal law
And all gardening prediction,
That life forced our son into flower,
The disordered thicket of personality
Now pruned, excessive canes careening wildly
Now cropped: now the stalwart limbs,
Now the attitude to train
For which the man is the name.
The laughter in the garden,
As absent once as birds in Winter,
At four years of age returned to flutter,
Without mockery telling us,
The lack of wisdom,
The impatience,
Of his father and mother.
( November 4, 1985. I wrote this poem when my son was a few months short of four years of age. As life turned out, the poem would have been equally appropriate fifteen years later. As he is now raising his own son, Rohan, I thought he might enjoy my contemplation of his early years.)
Comments