Poems About Mothers and Flowers

Flowers, I have learned, are not about beauty. They are about the argument a seed makes with the dark: I will not stay here. I will go up. The tulip doesn't know it's beautiful. It only knows the sun is in one direction and the soil is not it. My mother kept a garden that didn't match. Nothing coordinated. The roses grew beside the weeds and she refused to choose between them, saying: everything that grows has made a decision to be here, and who am I to disagree? I bring flowers to the table now— not the expensive ones, the ones from the corner shop that are already halfway to wherever flowers go. I bring them because a room with flowers is a room that has declared something quiet and defiant: there is still time to put something beautiful in the center of things and build the day around it.

The tulips don't know it's still cold. Or they know and they don't care— which is, honestly, the braver option. They push through the last stubborn layer of frost like fingers reaching through soil toward a sun they can't see yet but believe in anyway. This is the defiance I want to learn: to bloom when nothing around you suggests it's time. The daffodils went first— the extroverts of spring, the ones who show up bright yellow and unapologetic, like a friend who enters every room as if the room was waiting for them. But the tulips— the tulips are the quiet ones. They arrive in rows, in ranks, in impossible colors that didn't exist in the gray vocabulary of winter: fuchsia, coral, the kind of red that makes you understand why languages invented the word "vivid." A single tulip is a cup holding nothing and everything. A field of them is a standing argument against despair. I plant them every fall and every fall I forget where. And every spring they remind me: the things you bury with love have a way of returning exactly when you need them. Not where you planned. Not how you expected. But there— sudden, impossible, insistent— coloring the world back in one petal at a time.

After she died, her garden kept going— which felt, at first, like a betrayal. The sunflowers faced the sun without her permission. The daffodils came back without her calling. The roses did what roses do: bloomed, thorned, refused to grieve. I didn't know what to do with a garden that didn't know it was an orphan— so I watered it the way she taught me: too much, too often, talking to the flowers like they could hear. Maybe they can. By July the sunflowers were taller than either of us had ever been— golden, absurd, leaning toward the light the way she did, the way I'm learning to. A garden is not a metaphor. A garden is dirt and patience and the stubborn insistence that something beautiful can come from something buried. But also, yes—fine— it's a metaphor.