First Bouquet (Poetry)

Ten days old and drooping, papery petals curled,
I changed the water, sorted out the dead
and dying, snipped and pruned,
discarded withered leaves,
while she was out doing who-knows-what
girls of seventeen do with their friends.

Her birthday gone but still alive in these few stems
salvaged from the armful she brought home,
bubbling with the romance of it all —
thrilled as I was with my first love’s gift
of flowers in their crackling cellophane
with a card I never kept that said his name.

The blown, thick-cream lillies shed their pollen, streaked
the bath and stained its empty shine, and now
the once-so-wide bouquet is whittled down to posy-size —
one lily left to crown the pale carnations’ yellow-budded heads,
a few surviving white chrysanthemums, spider-frail,
amid gypsophela’s grey-green and dainty froth.

Day by day, each flower fades and in due turn
her skin will lose its fresh-grown flawless bloom,
her hair its lustre, eyes their clear deep blue —
it seems both love and beauty have no other aim
than to brighten rooms, shoot their magic through,
then sadden with the promise of decay.