poetry

• Lilies

  Flowers are like people:
  they shrink and grow

  cyclically, organically,
  without knowing why.

  My friend, consider the lily:
  it tilts its face to the sun

  then retreats into the dark
  for months to imagine

  itself and reinvent
  itself again and again.

  You know not all lilies
  are Lilium by genus

  but are lily by name,
  by stature, by joy

  of their blossoms,
  which cannot be hidden

  but bloom ecstatically,
  perennially, just as we humans

  wish we could.

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