A Violence of Poppies

reseeded in your garden each year, growing
wider and wilder, enlarging their realm.

If I did not dig out their spiny seedling in spring,
they would have become a field of uncontained fury.

Others mistook their effusion for beauty, but I knew
the poppy’s poison all too well, just as I knew yours:

black eyes of contempt, heavy head nodding
in silence, affirming grave disappointment.

How often I tried to please you with a bouquet
of brilliant spleen cut fresh from your garden,

set upon your dinner table to brighten
the dismal spell of our grim gatherings there.

But the petals always dropped like fiery angels
tossed from heaven before the meal ended.

Years later, I learned to singe the poppies’ cut stems
with a flame, to cauterize their wounds, to seal

in their dour blood, to keep their judgmental heads
nodding through an entire eternal meal.

But by then I was done with what seemed a good,
right thing to do. By then, I set the flowers aflame.

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The Poet Laureate of Ridgefield, Connecticut, B. Fulton Jennes serves as an educator and poet-in-residence for the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, where she develops poetry programming and special events. Her poems have or will appear in The Comstock Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Stone Canoe, Connecticut River Journal, Night Heron Barks, and other publications. Her chapbook, Blinded Birds, was published in the fall of 2021.