As Flores

The Flowers

Consider the flowers: true only to the earth,

yet we lend them a fate, from the borders of fate,

and supervise their fadings, their little deaths.

How right that we should author their regret:

everything rises–and yet we trudge along,

laying our heavy selves upon the world.

What wearisome teachers we are for things!

While the earth dreams on in its eternal childhood.

But if someone took them into infinite sleep,

lay down with them… how lightly he would waken

to the strange day, out of the common deep–

or perhaps he’d stay: stay until they weakened,

and took him in as one of their own kind,

a meadow-brother, a breath inside the wind.

Don Paterson, Escócia (1963)