ODE Poem: Our Flowers and my Field, by Nicholas Bernstein

Things were over
like a snap of my fingers.

I felt like a flower bed
carefully curated
next to a grassy yard,
overgrown and needing a cut,
but the lawn mower,
instead of trimming the too long grass
ran over the beauty
of yellow, red, and blues,
textures fuzzy and fluid,
whacked down without remorse.

But with a wry smile,
by you.

Prior however to the flowers being killed,
promptly every week,
They were cultivated with the most care.
they were watered and weeded,
they were even talked too,
so was the massacre some kind of mistake,
or was it premeditated?

And then I remember the wry smile.

Either way the why doesn’t matter
he decided to chop down our flowers,
and despite me being left
sitting in the remains
of chopped petals and crushed stems,

I got up,
and went to the grass adjacent,
that had been left
to grow tall with weeds,
and I slowly, with care,
began the long journey
of recultivating my own field.