Day 661: Forsythia

 

In keeping with the flower theme of the month, here's Billy Collins contemplating forsythia. 

Forsythia - Billy Collins 

It caught my eye a while ago, lit up 

against the gloom of the woods

in the corner of a wild field,

the pulsing color of caution. 

And now that I have spent a little time

on this stone wall watching its fire

flare out of the earth

I begin to think about the long chronicle of forsythia

how these same flowers have blazed

through the centuries,

roused from the ground by the churning of spring.

I would rather not look around the next 

corner of the year to see how this will die,

its lights going out,

its bare, arcing branches

waving like whips in the bitter wind. 

So I sit facing the past,

letting my feet dangle over the wall, 

beating time against stone with my heels

as the long gray clouds roll over me. 

Remember how Arnold by the Channel

thought of Sophocles who must have heard 

the same shore-sounds long ago,

walking by the edge of the Aegean?

Well, I am holding in the palm of my thoughts

all the others who once were stopped,

like me, by this brightness, 

this sulfuric cry for help:

women in tunics, women gathered by a well,

men in feathers, men swimming by a river, 

all speaking languages I will never know,

saying the different words for its color 

as I feel the syllables of yellow form in my mouth 

and hear the sound of yellow fill the morning air.