FLOWER Poem by Ruth Lasters

White flannels with which you wash your old father
harden in the night into envelopes for

unwritten letters to each other (one day there'll be a machine, Pa,
which with electrodes on the scalp will register and print out

the epistles you wrote only in your thoughts, never noted down. So they
will lie after your last breath in a pile exactly

your own length). For God's sake, keep your legs still, Father!
Perhaps there grows in the brains of parents who are changed

unnaturally by their child, an image of always the same
weird, impossible flower - draw it in the steamy mirror -

like a new species of flower runs riot after
nuclear radiation.