A Gathering of Blooms
- A Gathering of Blooms
For Anastasia
I watch my child dart between swords of sunlight,The day unwinding like an ordained path beneath her feet.Rebellion moves her out of reach of my voiceWarning her away from housefronts,strangers resurrecting their flowerbeds for spring,and lawns still muddy from April showers.
Her partner in crime, all of five years old, a sturdy bleached blondrushes to catch up and play male lead.They decide to investigate a tulip bloom at the same time,bump noses and part in laughter.I smile in echo, thinking that ten years from nowthey would not even be able to meet eyes and shyly say hello.
I catch them whispering to each other about respective boyfriendsand girlfriends, knowing that to each other, they are simply friends.Adults could learn a lot from these two.
I cannot pinpoint the exact moment when I realized that I liked this job,mothering. Never a green thumb, what had been given to me to grow, was.I smelled lilac and my child's presence on a crisp breeze,and it was good. [End Page 124]
Artress Bethany White (bwhite@cn.edu) is a poet, writer, and scholar currently serving as Assistant Professor of English at Carson-Newman College. Her poetry and fiction has been published or is forthcoming in Callaloo, Painted Bride Quarterly, River Styx, Role Call: A Generational Anthology of Social and Political Black Literature and Art, Beyond the Frontier: African-American Poetry for the 21st Century, Appalachian Journal, and Harvard Review. Her scholarship has appeared in Making Connections: A Journal For Teachers of Cultural Diversity and Soul: Black Power, Politics, and Pleasure. Her book-length scholarly project "From Soul Conversion to Social Change: Religious Rhetoric as Narrative Strategy in African American Fiction" is currently under review.
