Life and Death of a Beautiful Lady

In the beginning, I looked harmless.
They never could have taken me for anything more.
I was such a little thing, just an infant.
My leaves were still shriveled,
They still curled into my body –
A thinner wisp of a stalk there never was.

Ah, but I grew, like all infants do,
Only I grew into a child of promise.
(Not all infants grow into promise.)
My leaves smoothed themselves out,
Widened into tiny replicas of my elders’.
My stalk stood sturdier and thicker
With tiny buds cresting its outer seams.

In a short time I passed into a new phase
And became an awkward teenager.
(Not even childlike promise could spare me this.)
My leaves outgrew my poor stalk,
Transformed into the sails of ships that no mere twig could hold.
The only counterbalance to this injustice were flowers –
The flowers that sprang from those tiny buds.
Dainty little purple things of majesty,
The beginning of a being’s undoing.

At last I reached my heyday
I became a woman in my own right.
My stalk was long and tall,
More than capable of holding the burdens my leaves presented.
Oh, such splendiferous leaves you never saw.
Branched from the stalk, they perched like birds.
And among those birds sat ripened berries
Developed from the majestic flowers of youth.
They were deep purple in color, plump and ripe
Just perfect for greedy little fingers to pluck off the branch
And pop into a rose petal mouth.

In the beginning, I looked harmless.
They never could have taken me for anything more.
But two nights past they buried that child,
And tonight they’ll cut me down.
They’ll tear up my roots, and no longer will I grow
With purple flowers and illustrious berries
With tantalizing poison masked in the juice of fruit.

Unlike their babe, I’ll get no shiny white casket.
No one will mourn or weep at my death,
Or place a flattering tombstone at what might have been my grave:
“Here lies Belladonna, the deadliest nightshade of them all.”