Since it was meant to be the first day of Spring last Friday, the 20th of March, but many of us no doubt are feeling confused, bewildered and perhaps lonely, I thought it might be nice to lighten the mood briefly with this poem.
I wrote it some years ago when I was in a rather bleak place emotionally in general, but one day as I was walking through Cardiff Civic Centre, I suddenly noticed a municipal flowerbed of very bright varicoloured tulips. The beds all had a low decorative edging of iron work, most of them containing neat rows of small flowers – but these tulips were sprawling every which way, for all the world as if they were trying to scramble out or attack the knees of passers-by. The flower heads were bending towards each other and peering over the fence and it looked to me as if they were chatting rowdily with each other.
The very idea of wild and dangerous tulips made me laugh aloud and as I walked on this poem formed itself inside my head, to be later written down and worked on.
The Mayor considered that the gardens ought
To have a share in Spring.
Tulips would be respectable, he thought,
Quiet, and quite the thing.
“Obedient tulips stand in rows,” he said,
“And never make a mess,
But to make sure, we’ll still fence off the bed.”
The councillors said “Yes.”
But oh, if they had only known the truth!
The Spring can’t be confined.
Those wild and dangerous tulips, like our youth,
Subvert the civic mind.
The typists, all seduced from sober ways,
Remove their woolly vests,
While golden waves of flowers fall in spray
Around their naked breasts.
The treasurer cries “How erroneous!
The scheme has fallen flat.
Next year I say, stick to begonias,
And plastic ones at that!”
The stripy tulip tigers roar, and try
To reach with yellow paws
And swipe the ankles of the passersby,
Gnashing their crimson jaws.
Pubescent schoolgirls walk in twosomes near,
Still thinking of their sums.
Those saucy orange tulips wink and leer,
And try to pinch their bums.
Tell all the filing clerks to stay away—
Some things cannot be filed.
With sex and aggro in the park today,
The Spring is really wild!
A smile a morning and a lifting of the heart x
Love it Elinor, tulips are probably my favourite flower and I love them through all their stages.
I get my leg pulled with my tulips indoors because I keep them for weeks, through all the dying back stages as they bend and twist to all sorts of shapes . I delay their removal to the compost for as long as possible.
This poem gives these beautiful flowers a real personality ……….absolutely true in my eyes.
Enjoying your posts, I look forward to the next one to bring a joy to my heart.