The Flower Festival
When everything is gathered in as for an ark
or the Last Day, I hope there’ll be a place like
this: where cultivars lean against wild flowers
and Sweet William is arranged among green leaves.
That red Pillar roses will climb in shade
through, oxeye, sorrel, yellow spikes of grass
and there are five pink sweet peas and two
deep blue delphiniums in a jug.
That I will know as second nature, Ladies Mantle,
Yarrow, Elder, Poppy, the gardens where
they grew, the hands that planted them,
the faces who waited to walk there on warm afternoons.
Perhaps the air will be spun with mint, lavender
and blossom. All the agrimony remedies from
Culpepper’s book, as healing against serpents,
temper. and augues. There may be no need for names:
as each petal frond and stem will hold a memory
of somewhere loved, fields and verges known
since childhood, a wedding dance, winter goodbyes,
the burn of autumn, a meadow in spring.
And so collected, on cool sills, in vases
and old jars this heavy headed lilt of summer,
will be proclaiming laughter, our voices
and these words:
‘This is the ribbon of how we spent our days.
This was beauty. This was good.
This was grace.’
*Clare Crossman has just finshed being writer in residence on Heritage Lottery finded Sharing Stories project in the village of Weston Colville.(Cambs) In March 2010 The Shape of Us was published by Shoestring Press Nottingham.She runs a writers workshop at The Tavern Gallery Meldreth and is working on a new collection.
