I thought of the poet e.e.cummings the other day when picking flowers from the garden. He wrote many poems where flowers became a central recurring motif. I was thinking of the one he wrote where the moon was a ballon filled with “pretty people” which sailed away…”where always it’s Spring) and everyone’s in love and flowers pick themselves”.
Picking flowers is one of my a favourite activities. I always wanted a garden filled with flowers which I could pick from all year round. I didn’t realise that I would rank this among my top 5 favourite activities until I did a quick 10 minute creativity exercise when I was devising creativity prompts for my upcoming online course.
For the exercise I wrote out 5 colours and matched them with 5 different activities I love to do. I associated the colour green with picking garden flowers. Then I did a ‘doodle’ with a green ink-tense pencil, the sort that when you wet it, the pencil marks become like coloured ink. A sort of alternative to ‘serious’ painting.
Of course I added other colours, like red for geraniums and yellow for their centre and immersed the picture in golden sunshine. Suddenly I had a whole story that meant something to me.
I think these playful experiments become powerful links to your own subconscious, unlocking the stories you carry deep within. I then proceeded to go out into the garden and pick flowers to arrange in vases. This was another strong childhood memory of my mother carefully arranging flowers in vases in the house, something her mother did too. A matrilineal lineage of flowers, gardens and home making.
So when it came to writing a eulogy for my mother’s funeral twenty years ago, I naturally chose another of my favourite flower poems from e.e.cummings. This is it, and it still makes me weep.
if there are any heavens my mother will (all by herself) have
one. It will not be a pansy heaven nor
a fragile heaven of lilies -of-the-valley but
it will be a heaven of blacked roses
my father will be ( deep like a rose
tall like a rose)
standing near my
(swaying over her
silent)
with eyes that are really petals and see
nothing with the face of a poet really which
is a flower and not a face with
hands
which whisper
This is my beloved my
(suddenly in sunlight
he will bow,
& the whole garden will bow)
e.e.cummings Selected Poems 1923-1958 Faber, 1960.p.27.
Faces . Mixed medium. 2014- from the I Was Here exhibition Lismore Regional Gallery, 2015.