First Wild Iris of Spring

I stumbled on it, looking at something else, and then there it was, assertive, flapping like the national flag of spring, and I thought of this:

The Wild Iris
by Louis Gluck

At the end of my suffering

there was a door.
flickered over the dry surface.


Hear me out: that which you call death
I remember.

Overhead, noises, branches of the pine shifting.

Then nothing. The weak sun

It is terrible to survive
as consciousness
buried in the dark earth.

Then it was over: that which you fear, being
a soul and unable
to speak, ending abruptly, the stiff earth
bending a little. And what I took to be
birds darting in low shrubs.

You who do not remember
passage from the other world
I tell you I could speak again: whatever
returns from oblivion returns
to find a voice:

from the center of my life came
a great fountain, deep blue
shadows on azure seawater.