Willow Harth: Untitled ["This poem is not meant for you"]

This poem is not meant for you
unless you too have been underground
choking on your life's debris, and
playing peek-a-boo with death seriously

then the surprise of ten thousand buttercups
out of nowhere on every side where they'd
never been before on my daily walk
might have had the effect on you it did on me

because suddenly

I wanted to understand how these particular
flowers came to be—the whole evolutionary
history of mosses, ferns and angiosperms,
the miracle of photosynthesis and DNA, not

to mention the longings of the Milky Way
to reflect itself in the form called flowers and
in these buttercups, which seemed like a
visitation from the sun, urging me to tell you, in
case like me you had forgotten

we are the universe's latest way of blooming.

Untitled ["This poem is not meant for you"] by Willow Harth. Text as posted on On Being with Krista Tippett (07/23/14).

Art credit: Photograph by PA in the Daily Mail (06/02/2013). Caption: "At long last: A vast carpet of buttercups glisten in the sunshine in fields close to the River Wharfe near Bolton Percy in North Yorkshire [England] this morning."