All was forbidden in those sad years
A valediction forbidding nuptials
leached from the broken teeth of tarnished months,
mouths sullied with the mud of interrupted promises, 
sullen delays like three-day rains,
worse than the failure of the mechanic to get to your timing chain
or your publisher to put out your book
or your creditor to refund the payment from double billing
     on account of supply chain shortages 
in the Bureau of Consumer Honesty
 
No engagements could be secured, vows honored
or invitations mailed
Cinderella’s shoes were frivolously dispatched to lighten the feet
      of some other mothers of some other grooms,
Love’s best ambassador sealed at the lips,
       blind Cupid shooting arrows at himself,
and even hymns to June were out of tune.
 
Ask not what to say
of another year, another time
For we have bitten many dates, and tasted few

Ask not what to think of such insoluble mysteries,
but merely answer:
They do
                        

Bluets, Columbine, star flowers
Achillea: those mustard-plated offerings,
concocted of tiny buttons distinct as hours. 
purple loosestrife, and that distant cousin, 
Lysimachia vulgaris, dusk-purpled leaves and stems giving way,
amid a titter of surprise, to 
delicate buttery blossoms, turning up their noses  
at the fuss, and hogging the sun and water:
Short rations for roses

Field of yellow, field of blue
You are a field of freedom
Where else would I roam?
Who better love than you, heart-felt home?
Faithful companion; persistent, never dull,
undemanding in your attention
Quietly spinning and weaving where the doors of perception
are open or shut: sisters of invention
Blue and violet asters, meld with golden clover,
Stray shoots of all that springs,
hollers and hoots,
and in its moment homeward roots,
breathes skyward, grows wings
                        

They are burying children
On the first days of June
The world is a beautiful place
That we have turned into a slaughterhouse
I ask the Roses to forgive me
I beg the Irises to stay a while longer
And help us become as they are, keepers of beauty
Teach us to walk in the natural light of compassion
And avoid the thorny dells of the heart
from which only blood flows
Peonies soon will arrive, but will they remain?
Are they not our children too
and so acquainted with the brevity of our compassion?
The slimness of our restraint, our capacity not only
for the severing of living beings,
But for wielding the stubborn serpent’s tongue that sloganeers
over slaughter?

Ah, you wildflowers of the vernal wild
When we clip you by the necks
And proclaim to the skies that these sacrificial blooms
Stand for the memory children of Uvalde, the children of Newtown, 
of Parkland,
For the cruelly extinguished lives of bullet-flowering Columbine…