O Little Buttercup
Good morning, little buttercup!
Delicate saffron petals
trembling in the wispy breeze...
I hope your morning passes happily there
by the front steps, in the little plot of hard dirt,
little different from the sidewalk beside you.
Say hello to the fledgling weeds poking their noses
up around you, ready to steal your water and nutrients:
And hello also to the minuscule insects crawling
higgledy-piggledy up and down your stem,
devouring your leafy green outfit,
and leaving you pock-marked, and ragged.
Say hello to the as-yet-unnamed disease
that tends to kill buttercups in a matter of days,
which is turning the foliage of the hopeful
flower children around you to rice krispies;
And hello, too, to the mailman,
whose footprint from yesterday
I see vaguely in the flower bed beside you—
I hope he does not nail you today;
And hi to the cat that swipes at
a bee on your stamen with his razory claws,
and the dog that shoots a stream of hot urine
over your golden head—
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nice break from the steamy sunshine
streaming down for the tenth day running,
curling the remnants of your crunchy-edged leaves, as you
slowly die hideously from relentless thirst.
But do not despair—rain is predicted!
Buckets and torrents of rain, you will be
drowned, then battered by eaves dripping rainwash
for hours until your stem and roots
feel pasty, formless, and as gnarled as the
bark of the old oak tree far above you
that will drop acorns on your devastated body
later this year, the oak whose massive,
unseen root network could, and may, choke your
threadlike baby roots as though in a scoutworthy square knot.
And what of it?
You will bloom for a moment,
send forth your seed to the same infernal predicament,
then blossoms will fall away and you
will appear as prosaic and lifeless
as the weeds that even as I speak
grow stronger,
for they are tougher and more resilient than you.
Ah, buttercup! Say hello!
It is spring, and the drama of this
flowerbed—from which your cannot hope
to escape—unfolds.
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