Daffodils

Remember how we picked the daffodils?

Nobody else remembers, but I remember.

Your daughter came with her armfuls, eager and happy,

Helping the harvest. She has forgotten.

She cannot even remember you. And we sold them.

It sounds like sacrilege, but we sold them.

Were we so poor? Old Stoneman, the grocer,

Boss-eyed, his blood-pressure purpling to beetroot

(It was his last chance,

He would die in the same great freeze as you) ,

He persuaded us. Every Spring

He always bought them, sevenpence a dozen,

'A custom of the house'.

Besides, we still weren't sure we wanted to own

Anything. Mainly we were hungry

To convert everything to profit.

Still nomads-still strangers

To our whole possession. The daffodils

Were incidental gilding of the deeds,

Treasure trove. They simply came,

And they kept on coming.

As if not from the sod but falling from heaven.

Our lives were still a raid on our own good luck.

We knew we'd live forever. We had not learned

What a fleeting glance of the everlasting

Daffodils are. Never identified

The nuptial flight of the rarest epherma-

Our own days!

We thought they were a windfall.

Never guessed they were a last blessing.

So we sold them. We worked at selling them

As if employed on somebody else's

Flower-farm. You bent at it

In the rain of that April-your last April.

We bent there together, among the soft shrieks

Of their jostled stems, the wet shocks shaken

Of their girlish dance-frocks-

Fresh-opened dragonflies, wet and flimsy,

Opened too early.

We piled their frailty lights on a carpenter's