After COVID Came

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By Bill Gramley

You put a vase of scarlet tulips on my grave, a summer gift,

 and I expect you’ll bring a clutch of wildflowers from a rural road,

 the September yellow ones so bright whose names I do not know,

  and they’ll invite the ginkgo leaves to skip across 

    my mound in golden glee!

I’ll watch November’s raucous, rusted leaves

 invade the shallow moats around my plot and there enrich the soil.

All this will comfort me when cold and shorter days

 stiffen the stalks of those winter weeds I love to watch.

Yet violets blue upon the ground and daffodils above

 Will soon unfurl their flags of hope and joy and life!

           I know you’ll come around again

 and we can speak of all those treks we took

   to catch the colors each season brought, then shed,

    since we believed such glory would never end.

Then COVID came. 

photo by Torsten Dettlaf