Underneath The Flowers Poem by Robert Rorabeck

I develop you while walking the way I know
Home-
The day is hot- the sea is foam:
I have two beers in a plastic sack and a serpent
To germ-
My friends, they are buried with the stewardesses
And the prostitutes, over the canals
Or the chain link fences- and we can see them
If we learn to swim through the shallows.
Their voices are healthy underneath the flowers,
And in their palms like instruments the dens
Of ant lions,
And in their eyes like decorations, the fires of
Chrysalis over the way that it turned out-
The airplanes touch down softly over
Their cenotaphs, the foxes leaping at their
Zoetrope-
The stewardesses laugh at their excursions like
Monarchs,
And they will go home to abandon their children
In the milk weed,
Who will grow up to follow them like shadows
Over that which has already vanished.