A Walk on the Wild Side

Wildflowers

by Reginald Gibbons

Coleridge carefully wrote down a whole page   

of them, all beginning with the letter b.   

Guidebooks preserve our knowledge

of their hues and shapes, their breeding.

Many poems have made delicate word-chimes—

like wind-chimes not for wind but for the breath of man—

out of their lovely names.

At the edge of the prairie in a cabin

when thunder comes closer to thump the roof hard   

a few of them—in a corner, brittle in a dry jar   

where a woman’s thoughtful hand left them to fade—

seem to blow with the announcing winds outside   

as the rain begins to fall on all their supple kin

of all colors, under a sky of one color, or none.