That dew-wet glistening wild iris doesn't know where it comes from, what drove the green fuse, the poet said, up and out into the flowering I see in the dank flat of the creek, my eye drawn there by a Virginia rail who keeps disappearing as they do, unlike the flower which stays exactly in the place the heron stands every day, the flower no doubt fertilized by heron shit, or deeper -- those rocky bones my daughter found of the Jurassic lizard. I said to the flower one brain-bleeding morning that I don't know where I came from either or where I'm going, such a banal statement however true. O wild iris here today and soon gone, the earth accepts us both without comment. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...DREAM SONG: 2 by PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR FORERUNNERS by RALPH WALDO EMERSON THE COMING OF SPRING by NORA PERRY WHAT BEST I SEE; TO U.S.G. RETURN'D FROM HIS WORLD'S TOUR by WALT WHITMAN SOLOMON AND THE WITCH by WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS SORCERY by THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH LESBIA'S COMPLAINT AGAINST THYRISIS HIS INCONSTANCY; A SONNET by PHILIP AYRES |