Daffodils, Tulips, and Bricks
Yesterday I planted the daffodils before the frost
so they might know themselves while dreaming in the earth
and do what daffodils are meant to do when they bloom
beneath the benevolent spring sun in defiance of winter’s
icy grip. And when they wake from their winter dreaming
they paint the greening world of spring with splendor.
Today I power-washed the bricks, dull things of clay
to do what bricks are meant to do as they quietly labor
brick by brick in the building up of human shelters
one brick at a time in bonded trust with other bricks
to build those fortress walls where human enterprise
conspires to make us different from the Neanderthals.
Tomorrow I will plant the tulip bulbs before the frost
harbingers of the long-awaited spring. Their dirt-encrusted
roots and broken stems rested for a time in a sheltered box
exhausted and pitiable things; their shriveled tendrils
robbed of vigor as they patiently waited through the long hot
summer for the cool and redemptive touch of mother earth.
Yesterday. Today. And Tomorrow….
perhaps time is not really Time after all
perhaps Time is an ever-expanding and eternal – now
where daffodils and bricks and tulip bulbs conspire
to postulate and mirror the expanding universe
in the very ordinariness of their cellular being.