Tiger Lily Poem by Tara Teeling

Tiger lilies everywhere
mark highway margins,
smudging rocky crags
with wild, petalled fire.

They spread through moving fields,
waving lazily with
the goldenrod and
the fringed blue aster.
There’s something arresting
in the way they move,
something charming
in the common nature
of their grace.

Orange day lilies,
flora in the ditch,
lets the dead
all around them,
come back to life,
Lazarus flowers
breathing deeply and proudly,
under an unforgiving
July sun.

Cultured to smell roses
and instructed to fawn
over the pristine sister-orchid,
I shyly admire them
and their savage comeliness,
coveting that which would
surely seem unbefitting
behind closed doors.

Desperate to ease the ache
to pluck and snatch them
from the soil in which
they thrive, I look away,
thinking it wise and
believing myself humane.

I dismiss them
and their simple beauty
knowing it is easier to leave them,
than to watch them die
in the indulgence of
unwilling captivity.

To prop them up,
in a yawning, white
porcelain vase,
free from those elements
and the wrath of the seasons,
will only help them to
wither and vanish,
roaring softly
as they go.

The vase rests empty,
and the day goes on.