It’s like it snowed from the ground up last night,
A season’s greeting of proxy-crystals,
The five-pointed white petals
Of a flower called Spring Beauty.
They spread out as if in petal banks,
All set for packing into petalmen with corncob pipes.
It hardly seems fair to call a plant a flower,
No matter how abundant its blossoms,
When fifty of its yearly weeks are spent
Below the surface in hidden, rootish, nondescriptive drudgery.
But all’s fair in what inspires us, in love, in war, in seasonality,
In these briefly blooming spring ephemerals.
