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MEMORY, CONTEMPLATION, RETROSPECTION, AND DEATH MARY MERIAM A Tragedy of Flowers She says she is my mother, I’m her daughter. I take a photo of her by the water, blueberry picking, and her smile flowers. But she abandons me in darker hours, and so I search in the surrounding fields for any mother-love the landscape yields. There is a farmer with his summer yields. I visit him as if I were his daughter then nestle in the hollows of his fields beside a tiny trickling stream of water, and I weep there long and hard for hours, twisting chains and whistles out of flowers. There is a garden of my mother’s flowers. I wonder if the fragrances it yields will tranquilize my mind for all the hours I have left to be my mother’s daughter; or should I cross the muddy river water or turn around and traipse the same old fields. A herd of deer is bounding through the fields, fleeing afraid, although I offered flowers. They vanish in a hurricane of water, and nothing in the sad sky-weeping yields to prayers and wishes from a boggy daughter. How much longer, harder, are the hours. A storm’s been threatening in the east for hours and now I see it move across the fields. It slashes lightning near the house’s daughter, my porthole’s thunderstorm advances, flowers, retreats, the way my mother never yields a drop from all her barrels full of water. My mother’s flowers drink her howling water. She caters to the flowers’ needs for hours. The creeper weaves, the blossom bends and yields, and all around my mother’s garden, fields the farmer plows bow neatly to her flowers. I wonder if she notices her daughter, or if her daughter is a boat of water sinking for hours or a clutch of flowers strewing the fields until the tempest yields. ...

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