Flower Arranging Poem by Michael Wooff

Flower arranging has a feminine and oriental ring
feminine as if it called for dainty fingers
delicacy
oriental like the martial arts and ma
the space and silence separating things

but I could take karate
even boast of it
car maintenance sounds masculine enough
and so I too feel shyness
and avoid the table where the women gather to enrol

I saw one woman once
before the start of early morning mass
busying herself with winter roses
crimsoning grey light
and then
her high-pitched voice beyond the rail
a hasty genuflection
and the tabernacle totally transformed
by petals of dark blood

I felt a fear in this
the feeling that her offering
though perfect
was for all that
out of place
had ceased to grow
been drained of pleasing life
made clumsy and cut off

she was out of her element herself

and yet
herb robert
henbane
water crowfoot
grow apace where they are
and a dry stone wall
a wrack-strewn seashore
and a stagnant pond
are catalysts in their conversions

I think that there is room
in God's world
for the less-than-perfect
for
the stunted bush
the twisted tree
the thrusting dogweed
and the clumping buttercup
when these are rooted
in an honest living soil
and not upheavalled
squeezed of substance
dried
accommodated to the leaves of unread books
or blighted by the heresies of self

I think that God is satisfied
with dandelions and a tablecloth
when these are all we have
to place upon His altar
and I think
that I am grateful
on the whole
that life is an arranging
rather than a mere arrangement