I am cultivating amazement,
an emotion I rarely catch anymore. I
look around and marvel.

Marvelous that my mother found a batch of
seeds carefully bound in brown paper by her
father before he died in ninety-six.

My German grandfather, who tended
marigolds and roses, clipped hedgerows,
never liked to throw a useful thing away.

Amazing that, on being sown, the seeds sprang
into rangy orange cosmos, a sunset hue not often
seen in these wild blooms.

Now the German flowers blaze
on my mother’s apartment balcony,
immigrants like she was fifty years ago.

Yes, that does amaze me. Roughness
has not destroyed them.
Beneath their tough shells, tendrils waited.

How long can tenderness survive a dark hull?
Touching the petals, a dullness lifts from my face. I
am still awake.

Anya Silver is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Second Bloom (Cascade, 2017) and From Nothing (LSU, 2016). She has been published in numerous literary journals and anthologies, including Best American Poetry 2016. She was named Georgia Author of the Year/Poetry for 2015. She is a professor of English at Mercer University and lives with her husband and son in Macon, GA.

READ MORE OF ANYA SILVER’S POETRY IN HYPERTEXT REVIEW, SPRING 2018. YOU CAN ORDER IT FROM INDIEBOUND.ORG, BARNES & NOBLE, YOUR FAVORITE LOCAL INDIE BOOKSTORE, OR HERE.

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