The Sunflower

Already nine feet tall, the sunflower,

Past its own blossoms, reaches for the sky;

Joggers jog resolutely by, toward a goal

They never will attain. The cherry tree

Extends a gentle branch toward the street.

The suburban prospect’s a bower

Compared to the tangled woods behind.

I realize we serve a purpose after all:

Make room for Nature's far more complex art.

In that, at least, I play some little part.

Note: Our word bower derives from Old English būr, meaning “dwelling” (Merriam-Webster). Cf. "burrow."

Saturday, July 5, 2025

The Invaders

Some 1,285 plant species are currently designated as invasive in the United States.

—New York Botanical Garden Center for Conservation and Restoration Ecology

What price Shakespeare's starlings' murmuration,

let loose in Central Park by Eugen Schieffelin,

a man whose own forebears hailed from Baden-Württemberg.*

Beset by animal, vegetative, and human invaders

from alien venues planetwide,

there’s this small consolation:

despite the ubiquity of kudzu,

we're still the fastest gun in any zoo!

Uproot the bittersweet, pluck out periwinkle,

porcelain berry vine, and Japanese knotweed

(though that might physic you against Lyme).

And while you’re at it, have Bella put to sleep;

she kills our native birds—which makes one weep!

And Kelpie Buddy, too; he herds nonnative sheep!

* Schieffelin, an amateur ornithologist, supposedly wanted to introduce all the birds mentioned by Shakespeare in America. To that end, he released sixty British starlings in Central Park, New York, in 1890. "His attempts to introduce bullfinches, chaffinches, nightingales, and skylarks were not successful," Wikipedia says.

Saturday, July 5, 2025

Prayer for a Second-Guess Outcome

Hieronymus Bosch, De tuin der lusten / "The Lust Garden," oil on oak panels. Called The Garden of Earthly Delights. Museo del Prado, Madrid

In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire,

That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,

As the deathbed whereon it must expire,

Consumed with that which it was nourished by.

—Shakespeare, “That time of year thou mayst in me behold” (Sonnet 73)

  I pray to Heaven that I may be wrong,

—dumbest of pleas, it's hard to voice,

But thought allows no better choice,

Petitioning in darkening controversy,

Bad though the consequences may be,

If scant compared to what might well befall

Should it transpire I’m not wrong at all.

For if not wrong, I fear, I might be right.

  Daimonion, a second guess or sight

I ask not for myself, but for all redress—

Birds of the air, the dolphins in the sea—

That, in the upshot, life may yet shine bright.

I’ve always been a fool, so let me now, too, be,

The dumb self-petitioner of this sad address.

Friday, July 4, 2025