Forsythia Fantasy

For Sylvia, forsythia brings joy;
Wild tentacles waving and gamboling.
For Cynthia forsythia signals chore;
Time to trim and tame the unruly.

Sylvia’s frayed nerves mend.
She watches frilled limbs
Swinging, saying in abandon.

Cynthia’s afraid it’s time to mend.
She fret the boundless branches
Will scratch or brand one.

Sylvia mourns the butchered bushes
Forced into symmetrical subservience.
Cynthia’s morns fill with shaping, smoothing,
Protecting her sensibilities.

Sylvia says Cynthia sins
when she trims to
        sythia
            and shapes to
                    sylvia.

Sylvia pleas, “Cynthia, please please please cease.
We’re happier as one wild piece. ”

 

Forsythia Murder

Yesterday, they trimmed my forsythia.
They came unasked and simply decided
This bush is too big, the branches too ungainly.
It’s time to trim and tame.

They cut and cut and cut.
“It’s still too big,” they said putting the tools away.
“Come look, come see!” the said so joyfully.
“Aren’t you pleased we fixed it up for you?”

I said, “Oh” and walked off alone.
I wanted to cry and scream, “Don’t you know?
You hurt me and sliced me into pieces
When you whacked and hacked at my forsythia?”

Today I see they were trying to help.
They did not know the attack was on me.
The forsythia grew and returned to its wild and wooly form.
In fact, like me, it chose to strive to thrive.

 

Spring Fever

My heart aches and breaks when I see
fashionably shaped and hewn forsythia.

“Why,”
Asks my head, “do I care about
fashionably shaped and hewn forsythia?”

“Well,”
Says my metaphoric soul, “we are
unfashionably shaped and unhewn forsythia.”

“No,”
Replies my sensible self, “we are
separate and unattached to the forsythia.”

“Yes,”
Muses the romantic, “but I hurt
when I see fashionably shaped and hewn forsythia.”

“Mom!”
Call my children, “Will you
please let us trim that overgrown forsythia?”

“No.”

Sylvia Edwards