Flowers remember

I lay among the thorns of life but do not feel the pain, for the sweetness of it's beauty is the salve that blunts each stabbing prick.

The garden knows the direction!
Each morning the flowers face the east,
brandishing blossoms like out stretched arms,
praising the arrival of the sun below the trees.
The flowers know God and he, she, it,
knows them. Their fragrance the scent
of sweet creation, perfume from their souls.
Heady splashes of color shout the joy of
rootedness and purpose. While they sleep
in winter they plan and write their
canticles to silently chant them in spring.
Now I stand with them and feel the warmth
of my creator’s blessing, painting my face
with golden light, drawing me to the earth’s bosom.
How did the flowers come to remember that
which humans have so long ago forgotten?

©2012, Donald Harbour

It’s Earth Day, remember our mother, Gaea.

Odoriferous

Bradford Pear blossoms

There it is, that peculiar odor. An announcement heralding an arrival. This slap to the olfactories is a smelling salt of sweet scent mingled with decaying flesh. It proclaims spring to be sprung, buds to have blossomed, inoculating, scintillating, resonating the seasonal change. Everywhere it has laid a bland canopy of white. And, that is the only, the one and only salvation for the annual foliage of the Bradford Pear tree.

When there is passing
buzzard winds clean the bone
flowers will grow.

©2012, Donald Harbour

Haibun is a composition that combines a paragraph of prose in tangential or oblique relationship with a haiku poem. For We Write Poems prompt.

That smell

it is recorded in a brain cell
that one particular scent
the bouquet of it stains
as wine on a linen dress
an ambrosia of memory
carrying its own fetidness
that stench awakens consciousness
a cloddish backhand of the past
one only need savor its tang
the rankness of remembrance
is not the perfume of passion
nor the musk of desire
no it is the foulness of battle
searing nostril burning smoke
the odor of fear of stale sweat of pain
the stink of the jungle
the rancidness of the rotting earth
all nature returning to dust
the sounds can be dismissed but
never the malodorous carcass of death
an unwanted smirch upon life
the vial is opened so easily
bacon cooking on the stove
the smell of a gun oil rag
acrid Fourth of July fireworks
a red fluid reeking of iron
road kill baking in the sun
the obscenity permeates the nose
that offending orifice of breath
then like a passing bullet
it is gone until some noisome finger
pulls that mentally stored trigger
to fire that one overpowering sense
wounded by the mind again

©2011, Donald Harbour