Kevin Blankinship
See the fresh roses edging that fair snow
wrote an Italian poet with a prayer
he couldn’t see my garden, how the hare
gorges the buds before they start to grow
or having grown they fly off in a draft
then fall to stony ground & lie as peat
and pitifully they wither in the heat
till every bloom is gone, now just a shaft
still every year the flowers come again
Lazaruslike they sidle through the soil
ignoring winter carnage on the way
or are they masochists? which is it then?
Does nature well forget the awful toil
or run straight to it like a frenzied prey?
Kevin Blankinship is a professor of Arabic at Brigham Young University and a contributing editor at New Lines Magazine. He tweets as @AmericanMaghreb.