Lilacs on My Birthday
The flowerets look edible before they open,
like columns of sugar dots on tiny strips
I bought as a child. Hard to bite the candy without
some paper adhering, as adding machine tape will
to large, red numbers. Lilacs are like that: another year
unspools without major accomplishment,
while I question "major" and "accomplishment."
And when I find in Costco those clusters
of pointillist pastel, I hope they will become
someone else's nostalgia—honorable emotion
propelling Ulysses toward Ithaca, and a woman
to set lilacs in her dooryard as her mother did.
Copyright Credit: Joyce Peseroff, "Lilacs on My Birthday" from Eastern Mountain Time. Copyright © 2006 by Joyce Peseroff. Reprinted by permission of Carnegie Mellon University Press.
Source: Eastern Mountain Time (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2006)