Not Your Mom’s Day Lillies
Old Pound Ridge, the kind of town
Mom could just pull over and dig
A bucket full of wild day lillies
They then waving bye their leaves
Riding in the summer breeze of our tied open car trunk
And nobody cared
How’d you think they first got there?
Special, these were those orange ones that
Mom said grew native in the rural Northeast
Before then only tended to by Adam’s garden bees
And no one ever planted those Asiatic breeds
Packed and shipped from foreign shores
With spikey fingernail long leaves
Powder faced like Mandarin Chinese
Wistful, I’ve longed for those lillies by our mailbox
Here in my new home a half-life away,
Four decades since Mom passed away
And I’m spending this sunny day
Sorting through packages in a garden store
But these aren’t them from my way back when
Those times I can’t return again
It’s only a three hour car trip
And then a three hour run back
But I wonder would our old neighbors today
Call the police seeing me dig up theirs?
And think too of the tearing buds and leaves
In highway winds at turnpike speeds
My heart sinks to think of driving back there
To that place by our house on the roadside
Next to where our old breadbox sized
Yellow painted mailbox stood,
No numbers or ‘RR” laundry markered on
Just our family name
Where Mom planted those same wild lillies
I saw her dig up in that bucket
That then rooted and divided in
A crowded plot on the downhill slope
Below the stonewall to the road
That passed on by those too few years
Before age rerooted me far from a barefoot childhood
No, they’re not Mom’s day lillies
But memories with love I plant
Far from their lot in my transplanted city
