The Marigolds Poem by Rae Desmond Jones

when you saw
the burning marigolds
set in beds

rows of even spaced
garden variety marigolds
in the chilled

May sunlight
you knelt you say &
cupped their doomed

little buds &
pressed back their
petals until you saw

into your own gristy
core & where you
expected to

discover the white
single flame of God
you observed

that you could
only enter there
through all its parts

your throat its stem
felt the sap push up
through your belly

prising your neck back
you looked into the Sun
your marigold body

stem flower pollen &
face yearned into
its great mirror

& somewhere
in the vast rippling
centre in those massive

shifting caverns
of gas you saw the
marvellous symmetry of

the marigolds.

Now you want to
write a poem & ask
what words you should use

what can i say but
speak the thing in any of
its parts to

suggest the ambiguous &
undefinable marvel of
the thing which

is not any one
of its definable effects
before the winter

sets in out in
the garden & someone
comes along to rip out

the marigolds because
he hopes that if he
plants roses

three feet apart then
he can order & control
in neat manured

little squares
the power of growth