Daffodils
For Emily
How hard it is to live and how much harder not to die.
It was gray and damp today and the daffodils shot up painful;
you weren’t there to see them. But you might have liked them.
You might have liked the mud against the yellow. You might have liked
the throngs of students and their ambitious loudness,
the clouds stretched thin like an eyelid over the sun,
the grass on its way to green, the squirrels growing fat again.
So much death this month.
I don’t know what to say other than
those daffodils will rise and wilt like anything else
and some flowers are planted in fall. We must trust them to come again in spring.










