Irises

Thursday driving home from a funeral in Southern Illinois we stopped by an Iris Farm just outside Wayne City. The irises were in full spring glory. We purchased some rhizomes to take home. The iris farm is run by a mother-daughter team. Both Mennonite.

Nom de Plumes

Immortality
rises green from the dried husk
of an abandoned rhizome.

The iris blooms white, radiant
defiant in her perfection.

The box of late summer
catalog iris orders sat
undisturbed in the chaos
of a cluttered garage through
the entire fall and winter
not discovered until
a late spring cleanup.

Small nubbins of roots
were the only visible signs
of not quite total decay.

In May, in a sigh for the waste,
I buried the remains in the ground
without a bare tincture of hope.

And in the fall, flowers
Mother Nature, Total Recall and all.
A blooming miracle.

Darlene Moore Berg