How to Deal with Recalcitrant Plants

Weary of the pathos
brought by her brown thumb
my mother heard
plants respond to speech.

She turned to her orchid
bereft of the blossoms
it started with.
Lovingly, she coaxed,
stubbornly, it resisted,
persisted as scraggly foliage.

Next up, struggling philodendrons.
Every morning she praised
the stunted leaves clinging
to trailing tendrils
until they died of embarrassment.

Then an ivy caught her attention,
eyed her warily as she sidled close
and cooed,
"I have three little words for you."
Appraising its droopy runners,
she let loose with
"CHOP, CHOP, CHOP!"

Mom never did hold with small talk.

Solstice Tonight

Daylight slips from the forest first
but lingers over the frozen lake
like a kerosene lamp dampened,
its waning flame reflecting
cobalt across the canvas taut
with snow.  A gloaming snuffed out
on a last turn of the blue planet
as it tilts back toward summer,
a gyroscopic toy of the gods spinning
a bowline through the heavens.


Marilyn Aschoff Mellor

Christmas Gift

A forgotten photo
now reproduced, enlarged, found in a box
saggy with age, dampens your creased cheeks.
"It's my mother," you explain, unwrapped,
as if I didn't know.  Her funeral held
before Christmas on your fourteenth birthday.

Like the scattered Russian
                nesting dolls underfoot
                                   how do we fit together?

Grandma
forever young,
you unguarded as a child
absorbed with your present,
me now feeling like your mother
in this stack, somewhere, my own daughter.



Marilyn Aschoff Mellor