Recurrent Iris

So many days, green and warm,
       when she believed in peace forever,

when she let the sun on her skin
       like a lover, watched the clouds thin

and the idea of strife, of longing and desolation,
       left her body like illness.

She was alive! even happy! And no one to tell her
       This cannot be. Then something

on the wind—air from Siberia, from mountains
       that stay white all winter—

slipped under the sun that wrapped her skin,
       insinuated itself, bored in,

and there she was again, knowing she had to balance
       between the given and the taken,

the fields lush with green and irises and devastation
       irremediably everyone’s.

But then the roots, the green traveling
       from dark to light, again, again, again.

Lynne Knight | Global Marketing Makes Pomegranates Available Anywhere
Mudlark Contents | Mudlark Chap No. 66 (2018)