Compared to the other poems she posted over the weekend, her
poem about dead flowers is relatively easy to comprehend.
Her craft conveys real emotion, especially the agony she
apparently feels in the ritual of her trying to resurrect something that cannot
be brought back to life.
She opens the poem with a pejorative, setting a tone of
frustration over her inability to revive these “damned” dead flowers.
It’s almost as if she is performing CPR on a heart and is exasperated
by the fact, she can’t resuscitate it.
The “fresh and cool” water harkens back the very powerful
poem she also posted this weekend about the essence of love being boiled out of
a bitter cup she must drink.
She is kneeling on the floor trying to revive these dead
flowers, doing and saying what she had done before so many other times.
Her knees are “skinned and bruised” and she is almost like
one of those old-fashioned wash women with brush and bucket worn out from her
efforts, not just in trying to save these flowers but all of those flowers before
it.
Flowers – especially the rose – has always been associated
with love; so, I’m not going too far out on a limb to make that comparison
here.
Unlike some of her other poems, she is not angry at anyone
in particular in this poem, except perhaps for herself at falling into a
situation similar to those she’d encountered before. Reading this poem, you get
a “How many times am I going to have to go through this only to have it die
anyway?” kind of feeling.
Trying to save the flowers or love or whatever is an
admirable act, yet also a maddening one, and the death of the affair is not a
result of her failure at trying to – save it or make it work or revive it.
It is a ritual she had engaged in time and again, and she is
worn out from the effort.
The poem leaves unanswered questions such as “will she try this
again in the future?” and “will it always end up the same way if she does?”
There is a kind of Einstein equation for madness here, when
the genius once claimed that doing the same thing again and again and expecting
a different result is madness.
At some point, she knows she is going to have to stop.
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