A Grin and Gray Bouquet

Yesterday was the anniversary of a church friends' memorial service.
My only regret, this poem seems too much about me and not enough of sharing with her husband and family. Someday I need to get out of myself. Next time I write of a friends death, I'll try to focus on the absence felt by the beloveds' mourners.

 

A Grin and Gray Bouquet

She loved weeds,

  weeds and briar and sage,

Posted blog pages of macro lens

  bracken, cornflower, milkweed with spider webs,

Never a sunflower ‘fore a blue sky gay

  never bright dahlias, lilies by the walk,

All and always a tone meant of late fall gray,
In whatever season she roamed,

  with her camera out that day,
Miss Misunderstood,

  hers was a tale of two glooms,

One to fisheye fingers of death,  

  and one to crack the smile of doom

And when she died (can’t speak of that,

  it’s not for me to lay terms on her Family’s pain)

Her ‘in memoriam’ being proposed,

I thought for her only one kind thing,

  I shall make for her a bouquet!

A sunflower past tall summers grace,
  all seeds by crows pulled from it’s face,
Snips of dried thorned thistle pods

  that drab goldfinches pecked and mobbed,

Brown zinnias, cobwebbed, that matched
   how spry her witch gray hair was thatched,
Stood them in dirt, in an old Ball jar,
   then braced them up in the back of my car

Arriving with them at the church,
   the Family thought they were a mess,

The florist, even more distressed,
As I placed them between a spray of Wild Oscar lilies

  and a Rose-a-sharn display

 

      "Dead flowers, where did you find these?"
      "I brought them,"
      "Give them to me, I’ll throw them out,"
      "I made this bouquet, for Her,"
      "You can’t put that in the floral row,
         we’ll just ‘put it’ over here," as she 

Hid all behind the buffet iced tea cooler

After the service I took them home,

  knowing well they’d not be kept left there alone,

Where I placed them on the porch table,

  there, for a year, that’s where they’ve been,

‘Til last night blew them over with

  a dying Hurricane Hermine,
 

After a moment (with a dust pan

  and broom),

I took them to a flower garden,

  where the derelict Earth reclaims her own,
There I lay them, lend me pardon,

  and smiling let, my friend go home