Poem

“planting daffodils”

Listen to Charlotte Boulay read this poem.

The Friar tells her, drink this
potion and for a time
you will be
as dead.*
** What? she says, * Are you kidding? Only the earth knows that faith. But this love is of the earth, so when she sleeps, it’s in darkness, ****** a round weight curled in a papery shroud.

This fall, digging little graves, I can smell
******winter approaching like the war
that already rages, not with drumbeats and shots
but more ominously silent, a great lack
of lucidity and grace.****Too soon,
*******deaths have begun:

So is a rooted bulb a record
of a promise kept through winter. This is the truth we only half
believe:**that each hoary, twinned sprout becomes,
in the moment before she sees him,
*Juliet, waking to a clasp of arms,
*******yellow trumpets crying.