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Gathering
The Hyacinth Review
The Hyacinth Review

Gathering

by
May 27, 2022
Impressionist painting of a woman sitting near a vase of three sunflowers
Portrait of Suzanne Hoschede With Sunflowers, Claude Monet, 1890

Suzanne Honda (she/her) is a teaching artist and poet living…

My sunflower is dying. All day the blushing sedum is attended to by honeybees. There are snapdragons blooming and delphinium bold, still, their white fingers splayed like a palm holding an orange, a handful of cherries, stems balanced on a thumb whose worn pad creases the taut fruit in a vestige of hope we call gathering. The bicycles lean their lonesome bodies up against the ancient oaks, spilling early leaves while the season’s last crickets struggle to sing. We are together in this dying; soon it will be autumn, and the sky will tip her lovely chin away from the earth for longer and for days we will pause with the earth knowing we cannot grow without ceasing – but, like the lavender, like the milkweed, we must muster in ourselves courage for silence, for that rest which is no ending but rather a pause, a moment of waiting wherein amaranths bow reverent bulbs of soft violet to the concrete where the geranium blooms I plucked last week lay browning their once-pink bodies a late August sigh congregating with vibrant coins of zinnias gone to seed. Just now, a cream spider, opaque, has landed near my elbow, its legs
a cup in which its motionless husk is held. Why do pines grow up rather than out, spiring at the top of the tree and not the base; why must the sap on this spruce dry white; why do its needles smell best in spring and why are the clusters of yarrow still – and senselessly – blooming? This vibrance must give way to silence, a length of dark cut like a swath of fabric. Already we mourn this too-long decade. It is good to refuse movement, allowing roots to deepen. Poised underground, patient for spring.
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Suzanne Honda (she/her) is a teaching artist and poet living in Detroit, Michigan, with her husband and their two cats. When she is not writing, you can find Suzanne in her wildflower garden, wandering riverbanks, or driving the long coast of Lake Huron listening to one of her many mix CDs. She is published in Bear River Review and has work forthcoming in SWWIM Every Day.

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