Among the Lilies

“Ars Poetica” 30-Day Poetry Challenge - Poem #18

Claude Monet, “Daylilies”

06/08/2023

I wander among the lilies
   In the green garden enclosed by
      Trees, struck dumb with beauty, and I
    Think: how infinite the craft of
       God! For here are flowers of such
          Wondrous make that I comprehend 
     The Savior’s phrase: e’en Solomon’s
        Garb, compared with these, could not be
           Praised! Yea, the Lord hath draped the fields
In vesture fair, beyond Man’s art
   To recreate; for lily’s lace
      Surpasses seamster’s art to shape,
    And their petals’ vivid hughes the
       Dyer’s vat cannot transfuse to 
          Finest silk or cotton virgin
     White. Only morn and evening skies
        Cause shades alike sublime, and no-
           -where are there textures more refined.

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Notes: Like “In the Full Moon Light,” this is another double “nine-by-eight”(provisional name, of course) poem, about a wonderful evening I spent with an older couple who became my friends during the summer I directed my town’s local library. These two are originals: vegetarian Seventh-Day Adventists who see their gardening as a spiritual practice. The wife, the main creative force, is a seventy-one-year-old Yankee transplant to the Alabama, and possesses explosive enthusiasm, sharp wit, and infectious joy. She likes to talk to me about conspiracy theories she’s been researching using her extremely limited computer knowledge and her voracious reading habits, and she likes to talk to God as she walks through her gardens in the morning. The husband, native to the area, is a soft-spoken handyman type, robust but creaky and a bit older than his wife. He’s tall and slender and has remained more or less handsome, even in his middle seventies. They live in a built-out housetrailer that the wife has completely covered in murals on the inside. Their home is not air conditioned, and they leave their doors open for all sorts of critters to come inside. Currently they have several cats, and are feeding some raccoons and possums and at least one skunk. They run their own water from a creek that flows out from the mouth of a cave on their property, and they grow the majority of their own food. I visited their property again this evening, and this time brought my mother, who exclaimed over the flowers and promised to bring them a cutting from her snowball bush in exchange for some of their flowers. You get the idea. The variety of their lilies is astounding to me, and calls to mind the vocation of the two botanists in Jünger’s On the Marble Cliffs; when Jünger describes Brother Otho spending his evenings walking among the lilies, I’ll think of the inexhaustible varieties of stunning flowers I’ve seen this week.