August

{We’ve had a lot of rain here in North Florida lately, which has caused the ground to squish under your feet, and the plants to grow like crazy.  It has also been frightfully hot, much too much so, for most roses and geraniums and other temperate flowers to thrive, and the more delicate ones withdraw, or look sickly and forlorn. 

Cowpeas are a vine similar to black-eyed peas, that are a common cover crop here, and can be trained up bamboo stakes so they look like small trees.  They tend to grow together and onto anything that will support them, creating caves and tunnels that would be perfect for small children to play in, assuming no snakes were in the vicinity. 

Another vine, the passion flower, also proliferates this time of year, but with malicious intention.  It crawls all over the rosebushes and other bushes, and attracts lovely viceroy butterflies, but it either strangles or starves the plants of sunlight, as it climbs upon their shoulders.  

This particular rose bush in the picture has special meaning to me, since it was last August, when my father was at last released from the hospital, after a long stay. He got to enjoy a bit of sun in the company of these flowers in the rehab center’s healing garden.  It seemed very much like a new beginning.  But sadly, a month later, he passed.   

Hope everyone out there is taking a moment to smell the roses, even in the midst of so much sadness and confusion.  Thank you for coming by to read!}

Cowpea forests,

The end of July.

Or is it already

September?

Fairytale hovels,

A changeling’s bed.

Tendrils aloft.

Windy weather.

Washouts and gulleys,

Deep-full of our tears,

Squeezing the mud

From our lawns.

Soggy, moist mornings

Agog with our greens,

Grown yet two feet,

Dusk to dawn.

Clap goes the thunder!

And crash goes the lightening!

Like Genesis,

Tempting God’s wrath,

Broad, splay the orchids,

While climb crimes of passion.

And roses hang on,

For dear life.

Copyright 2020 Andrea LeDew

For another poem about a lover of roses, Napoleon’s Josephine, see Of Roses.