The Wildflower Garden

In which I sat in the wildflower garden in front of Kensington Palace and wrote a poem, just before it closed at 6 p.m. and they told me I had to leave . . .

There is a bee
busy
in the purple tuft of the knapweed,
perfectly happy —
like me, actually,
hidden among the Queen Anne’s lace
and goldenrod, sitting and therefore
as small as a child, pretending
there is nothing beyond this — the forest
of knapweed and Queen Anne’s lace
and goldenrod, that the rest of the world
does not exist — just this secret grove
of sunshine and steady buzzing,
these stalks towering above me
arrayed in gold and white and purple,
with the bees and I
and a random butterfly
its only inhabitants
forever.

(The image is Dans la Prairie by Claude Monet.)

This poem was originally published on my poetry blog, here: “The Wildflower Garden” by Theodora Goss