Spring 2022, Volume 32

Poetry by Joe Benevento

After Margaret Did Not Believe How Soon Forsythias Turn Green

“Margaret are you grieving,
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
           
                        Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Spring and Fall”

Margaret was not grieving over golden
flowers deceiving as they gloried
bushes before leaving them emerald
into Fall.  At six she could not
remember how soon April

makes December, how red bud,
magnolia, dogwood splendor
hardly lasts more than a week. 
Margaret loves the forsythias’
little yellow flowers adorning

ours and neighbors’ bushes,
collecting them, selecting also
tiny violets, other woodland wild
flowers to adorn an orange
juice glass proud to become a vase.

Blue-purple, white-pink and gold, these tiny
blossoms stay bright as long as their outdoor
cousins but soon top trash ready for discarding,
as Margaret’s miscalculations of how long
Spring blossoms linger, will work themselves

away, naturally as May kneels towards
summer’s passion.  This year, though, she will
probably lament how soon the maples, oaks
and hickories lose their leaves’ final fire.  For me
resignation leaves nothing left to long for,

so it is Margaret I mourn for.

 

 

 

BIO: Joe Benevento’s poems, stories, essays and reviews have appeared in close to 300 places, including: Prairie Schooner, Poets & Writers, Bilingual Review, Cold Mountain Review and I-70 Review. Among his fourteen books of poetry and fiction are The Odd Squad, an urban YA novel, which was a finalist for the 2006 John Gardner Fiction Book Award, and Expecting Songbirds: Selected Poems, 1983-2015, with the Purple Flag imprint of the Visual Artists Collective out of Chicago. Benevento teaches creative writing and American lit., including Latinx, at Truman State, where he also serves as poetry editor for the Green Hills Literary Lantern.