It has been a very long time since I’ve read this poem that I love, Red Lilies, by Richard Speakes.  When I got out the old December 1994 edition of Poetry and reread it, I thought I’d share the beauty…

Red Lilies

by Richard Speakes

For Joan Didion

We tame with explanations any red, provide

meanings into which we dive, the human

foxhole where the mind finds protection.

It’s fabulous out there, and one clump

of red lilies beside the house could be

the bullet that rips through the body of

all those connotations, our symbols,

the stories that make sense of our world.

Red Riding Hood and Christ’s wounds, mother’s

blood,

and the color the sun must be as one’s death

gives sunset its purpose, its passion at closure.

And then, rising, the moon punctuates the sentence

one’s life made, its last word that somehow rhymes

with all the words preceding, love and work

and sex.  One’s death is by nature that moment,

all the meanings folded into the bundle

one carries, tied to a stick of bone,

as one goes forth into eternity.

That exquisite nonsense is the world

the mind makes from the world it didn’t,

with words that are themselves blossoms

of the invisible, the world as we see it.

As a side note, it’s interesting to think that I read this, and loved it, long before I knew of Richard Speakes and Joan Didion.  I was in high school at the time, fancying myself a writer, and here I am today, fifteen years later, having gotten cozy with Didion’s writing last semester, and still loving that poem.