Prolonging Life

Free Verse Poem by Evie Groch

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Limp Lilac petals float down from stems
in the vase, not a long fall from the glass
tabletop in the sunroom to the parquet tiles.
One by one, they've been coming down
for over a week. One full week, but I cannot
yet give in.
 
The bountiful bouquet given to me several
weeks ago for my birthday by a friend of
over sixty years, charmed me with its elegance,
its sensual color drawing me in deeply.

 As a child, I never picked flowers. Once
picked, they would wither and die.
I rarely received flowers, didn't expect
or want them, but my mother and her green
thumb grew them, and for her they bloomed.
 
Later she would dry them,  paint them, encouraged
me to do the same, but I could not, not until
she passed away and I brought home all her
floral paintings to realize she was her own Georgia
O'Keefe, and I was her daughter.
 
Slowly, so very slowly, I warmed up to my inherited
trait and picked up a brush, followed by a pen.
My goal--to prolong the life of flowers in art, and
now in my vase, although my husband tells me it's
time to let them go. I cannot.
 
Today, when Carl again said, "It's time," I finally had
to agree he was right as I picked up another petal
from the parquet floor.

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Evie Groch's opinion pieces, humor, poems, short stories, and memoir vignettes, along with other articles, have been published in the New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, in anthologies, and on many online venues. She writes about travel, language, immigration, and justice.