FLOWERS AND UMBRELLAS
The umbrella is open but the rain is not ready to fall.
It shies and waits, waits until is already late to come.
Spring is near and I feel shy of the sun.
I kneel down by a flower patch and the dry
sidewalk feels cold against my hands. I keep thinking
of bees, buds and umbrellas, all in one thought.
Flower memories slap my face like a blast of winter storm.
I scroll down the images and my brain is smitten
by the possibility of love within thought. Images come,
go and change me slowly like spring opening its buds.
A careful dancer. I have time to think of flowers
and ballerinas, I have time to touch the bare,
infertile ground. Somehow I know the earth gives me time,
because she is getting ready, she is not timid of new buds.
I rise from the ground relieved to know how much I
don’t know, and how that much is what, somehow,
a flower knows. And again it is umbrella, bee and flower
in my brain, all in one thought.
(This piece is a winner of one of our Mandala book prizes)
Desirée Desirée is a PhD student in the Comparative Literature department at UBC, and her main research interests are literary translation, Brazilian and Canadian history, as well as poetry and film. She’s a published poet in Canada and Brazil, and she’s also a translator, having recently translated the work of Canadian poet P. K. Page into Brazilian Portuguese. Outside the university, her main interest is hiking mountains and more mountains.
