Ode to a Daffodil

I remember a day
when I was about six…

The day I saw the daffodil.

It was as yellow as a ripe lemon at the edges,
pale, and looking almost bleached,
like my mother’s yellow cleaning rags,
when they were old and faded from ammonia.
It was playing it’s delicate trumpet for the sun,
courting the bees with it’s sugary orange center…
a little world, balanced on a slender green stem.
Fragile enough to be crushed at a stroke,
even by a six year old.
I looked at it real close,
and I saw the softness of the moon-dust
that seemed to coat the bloom in velvet,
and I saw the brightness of the shine
as it reflected the sun at my face like a spot-lamp,
and I smelled the scent, sweet and fresh and new…
an exit to another world.

I had never seen a daffodil before.
There were no flowers where I lived.
Nothing would grow in concrete and filth.
And nobody cared to try.
Who would buy seeds, here?
Who buys paint, or toys, or flowers,
to decorate a pit they have fallen into?
You’re always going to get out tomorrow.
But they never got out, and they never learned,
that if you bought the paint, and the flowers,
perhaps you wouldn’t need to get out.

My mother died without ever having a garden.
She never planted a seed nor tended a shoot.

When I was six, I thought that flowers
were made of crepe paper and foil.

And then I saw the daffodil.

A remnant of a happier time,
one solitary daffodil,
a lone survivor,
still blooming and living,
amidst concrete, and chaos,
and urine stains, and trash,
in the one bright corner of a dark wasteland.

A few days later, it was withered and dead.
It was the first time I really got to see death.
Up close and personal.
I watched it slowly droop,
and dry up, and turn brown,
over the course of three days.

 

I remember a day
when I was about twelve…

I saw a daffodil.

It was a different daffodil,
in a different place,
further away,
but not too far…
not outside of the circle of filth,
the invisible fence that enclosed us,
a barrier greater than China’s Wall,
unconquerable, unbroachable,
better protected than federal gold,
and yet… not actually there.

I stood in the cool spring warmth,
and I looked at the flower,
and I saw it’s fragile beauty,
it’s defiance of the filth,
it’s willingness to live,
to tolerate this dross…
and I was angry.

And I thought of how that defiance would wither,
how it would crumble away to dust,
and in just a few days,
that face of beauty,
would be just a streak of green scum. 

And I was angry.

I snatched at the stem and pulled it from the ground and crushed it in my hands and shredded the petals into golden confetti and threw them to the floor and stamped on the remains and turned them into filth.

I have to tolerate this filthy existence.
The beautiful flower will not have to.
It’s defiance will never have to wither.
I will never have to watch it die slowly.

 

I remember a day
when I was about sixteen…

I saw a girl.

The first girl I ever thought was truly beautiful.
She had curly blonde hair and a yellow shirt,
and a sunny face in a permanent smile…
even though she lived here,
in this grim garden of destitution.

She was positive. She was defiant.
I looked at her, and I wanted to look so close,
to see the soft velvety bloom on her skin,
to smell her scent, sweet and fresh,
and to escape, and to start anew.
She was a whole world,
a world that teetered in every breeze,
adrift at the end of a long stem.
Hypnotized, I drank her in,
smelling her scent, and admiring her bloom,
feeling the warmth she reflected onto me.

For years, I drank her dry,
intoxicated by her smile and her smell,
living on her defiance,
existing on her will to live.
She was the flower in my wilderness,
in my concrete and chaos.

 

I remember a day
when I was about twenty five…

I saw a girl.

This girl wasn’t like my girl.
She was withered and brown,
turning to dust, hunched,
drooping and dry, ready to die.

She was wearing a yellow t-shirt.
But it was faded near the top.

She was standing near my front “door”,
polishing the filth with a yellow cloth,
prepared to tolerate this, to try to live,
defying the dirt as it strangled her…

And I was angry.

I thought of my mother’s cleaning rags,
old and threadbare, yellow, with big faded patches,
where the ammonia had thinned the cloth,
and you could see the sunlight through them,
as they dried out in the breeze.

My mother was twenty five, the day I first saw a daffodil.
I remember her hands were red from cleaning,
with bleach and vinegar and wax.

She tried, but she didn’t want me, and she didn’t want her life.

And I was angry...

 

I remember a day
when I was about thirty six…

I saw a girl.

She was as beautiful as a flower.
Perfect, and fragile, and joyful, and blooming.
And coming out of another s**t pit.
Another of the parasite dens we call “home”.
Followed by another of our s**t-dwelling weasels.
Six feet six with a gang tattoo,
expensive jeans,
cheap after-shave,
blank expression,
gold jewelry,
stubble.

And I was angry.

I strode right across that street,
and I punched that girl right in the face.
and I knocked her right on her a*s,
right from the blue,
while the muscle-toting weasel,
simply grunted in slack-jawed shock.

As he muscled me away, and the lights went out,
I remember…
stamping on her pretty face.

 

I remember a day
when I was about fifty…

I saw… my wife’s beautiful face.

Her beautiful face, cradled in my dirty hands,
so peaceful, so perfect, so fragile.

And I loved her more than I had ever loved her.
I needed her more than I had ever needed her.
I admired her more than I had ever admired her.

I remember the sound, such a tiny sound, really,
the sound of her neck snapping as she slept.

 

I remember a day
when I was about sixty…

I saw a daffodil.

I saw it outside, I could just see it,
at the very edge of the narrow slot of reality,
that the window allowed me.
It was the only flower I could see.
Nodding it’s yellow head in the sunshine,
one flower, in one bright corner of a dark prison yard.

But this time, I was free.
I didn’t need to kill that bloom.

That day was yesterday.
And today, they will kill me.

And tomorrow, that daffodil will still be there. 

Reviews

[ice]

OMG, Zoe, this is amazing..not the cliche OMG, but the one with true meaning.
So What is right, this poem is a marvel, and only two reviwes?..hard to believe.

The poem is real, down and dirty..ghetto real...real in the sense that it happens everyday..people lead wretched lives, the world looks different to them from the filth of Watts, or looking out the window in the South Bronx..There are no daffodils there, and if there was, they would be smashed and scattered..this is where your word pictures have taken me..

I love how the poem comes of age as the boy does, how at tweleve he realized what his life was to be like, how he rebelled by destroying beauty..The longer lines of rebellion are the most profound (to me) in the poem.

"I snatched at the stem and pulled it from the ground and crushed it in my hands and shredded the petals into golden confetti and threw them to the floor and stamped on the remains and turned them into filth"

Which leads to where that kind of rage and violence always leads, and that is to more of the same..

"I remember the sound, such a tiny sound, really,
the sound of her neck snapping as she slept."

And so, the poem becomes political for me..My feelings are that a child bereft of beauty in its surroundings will mimic what it was shown in later life. Instead of building playgrounds we build bombs, and prisons to contain what that choice of constrution has birthed.
Somehow I feel the poem ends on a note of hope..

"That day was yesterday.
And today, they will kill me.

And tomorrow, that daffodil will still be there."

The daffodil is the "thing with feathers", but it doesn't fly away.
It relies on us to see its beauty, and to responde to it. It dies last.

I ramble, I know, but when I read a poem such as this, I get emotional, and that, in a nutshell, is why I read poetry in the first place..
Thank you Zoe, for saying me this poem.

[Jim Parson]

This is utterly brilliant! I put it on my reading list a couple of weeks ago and hadn't had the chance to get back to it. I'm so glad I did tonight. This is one of the best pieces I've read since I joined this site. There is no possible way for me to give a review that could come near to doing this piece justice. It is pure genius and I will be revisiting it often. Well done, my friend, well done.

[Art Sun]

Tough world we live in Zoe...and yet within your poem one can see how even as a child we begin to grow and view then absorb the surroundings that are ...us...whether good or bad they are the journey we have been placed into. As one becomes older and follows the same path there are a variety of scenarios and yet all the same, this comparison to the dffodil exposes how one mind through different ages stil can become joy or anger, love or hate, and at the end when one realizes the mistake of there own they find that in the end the daffodil is still the same as when they were a child ...only life ends and daffodils bloom...continuosly. Nice work on this piece. *****

[Ashesh]

wow! just WOW!!

[Laughing-Bear]

As I went about my day today I pondered your poem, I at times came back to my cabin where I revisited your writing and then reentered my world so different in contrast to the one you exposed. It is a culture that I am very aware of, but many have no clue. It is at times referred to in sociology as the Culture of Poverty. A seemingly inescapable trap creating for most a pit of despair.
One would never have figured the way your poem began it would end with a man on death row. Good word pictures! I found the poem very thought provoking as it brought to the forefront of my mind a topic I would label as “Us and Them”. I may have totally missed your point I realize.
In a song off The Dark Side Of The Moon album, by Pink Floyd, called Us And Them, we are asked the fundamental question do we as humans have the ability to be humane?
When will we take responsibility and not place it on the government or the church? Stepping out of our comfort zone like the Good Samaritan did reaching out to those different from us with love and no expectations to give them the support and tools to make their lives better? When will we become a society of Us’s rather than a society of Us’s and Them’s with the Them’s not mattering?
How would we react if we were raised in a family, a village, a town, a city, or a nation where we never saw a ray of hope? When will we realize that everybody is someone’s special person and needs to be afforded the same hopes we all have?
An amazing teacher once told a story when ask who is my neighbor about a man that helped a man different than he. He told the story as the people who should of brought change were questing who they should be helping. It was determined in the story that those who should have helped did not, but the stranger who was different did, reaching out to help the man in distress, thus being neighborly.

neighbor |ˈnābər| ( Brit. neighbour)
noun
a person living near or next door to the speaker or person referred to.
a person or place in relation to others near or next to it.
any person in need of one's help or kindness (after biblical use): love thy neighbor as thyself. Maybe we should do the same, which just might prevent the destruction of any more daffodils. Maybe we will begin to see daffodils sprouting up everywhere. Though it likely will not happen I hope that some day the high and mighty will descend and the lowly rise with the result being fellowship. And I must always remember that there is a little bit of good in the worst of us and a little bit of bad in the best of us. I am not beyond reproach.
Very good poem, I hope I got close to what you were trying to word paint.

Blessings, Laughing-Bear

[Arabdha]

the descriptions and the level of detail in this poem is amazing ! this is one of the best writes on wc..this poem is about anything but a flower!..you show the ever-changing perspectives in various phases of the person's life so flawlessly through the metaphor of the 'daffodil'..opinions change as we age..until we start seeing things as they truly are..this is sheer brilliance ! 100/100 and going in straight to my favorites..

[John Jackson (El Juero)]

I will never look at Daffodils the same. Absolutely stunning story. Braided images kept tightly bound, the anger steadily building...And tomorrow, that Daffodil will still be there. WOW!
I am looking for the "favorite' button right now.
Out standing writing!

[trainwreck]

This was brillant! The perspectives were consistant and beautiful. I love your flow and style. You didn't need a scheme because you made genuine art. Great job!

[MandaBear]

wow, you never cease to amaze me

[SpokenWord]

People have sad that we are products of our community but I like the characters and flowers you had in here that stood up against that and defined themselves as individuals. The main character to have loved beauty so much and have an understanding of the struggle that flower had to grow in such a place like he described still he decided to end that flowers life rather than allow nature to take its natural course as if he was the judge of what deserved to live, struggle and survive he even considered it a favor to have done this.

It was almost like he was saying that he wasn't beautiful and he grew up believing that beauty needed to be destroyed so that it wouldn't wither and grow old and eventually die. He could only see beauty from the outside and didn't realize that it was always inside, it is the strength it took to exist in that place that he called home.

I love the ending in the end beauty wins in showing him that it survived even though he wasn't going to survive. Great write.

[Poeticadia]

Using the symbol of a daffodil for this narrative is genius. I love the way the daffodil so strongly represents the defiance and optimism that withers in the boy who realises early on 'You’re always going to get out tomorrow'... and that tomorrow never comes; he is incarerated in the slums, as the generations before him were... so he finds his own way out... his own freedom. The unbearable perception of "fragile beauty" mixed with the cold logic of his anger and the dust of the wasteland combine to make a dangerous killer who believes entirely in his misguided actions. And the clever part of this poem is... that we have followed every turn of his life and yet we are still standing with him at the end.

And then at another level it has me thinking about recurring symbols and how they work like bookmarks for emotions (as with the boy in the poem); how possessions, scent, visions, a familiar look about a face, a phrase etc. can command a particular emotion that haunts us, and can determine our actions in its presence, throughout our lives.

This is an exceptional poem and i hope it makes its way into a book some day soon.