Don't Leave Hungry: Fifty Years of Southern Poetry Review

Language of Flowers

J E A N FA R L E Y Language of Flowers The finest flowers of the grave Are plastic roses so firmly red They never curl or crave Any commerce with the dead; Nor privately leach their strength To divide and glory and multiply From the works of that swollen trench Too easily pierced by the mourner’s eye. Steadfast and incorruptibly pure, They advise all summer long Of the death which living flesh obscured: The shameful flowering now is gone. 36 ❚ The Late 1950s and the 1960s ...