Tennessee through all the too-hot months
is a lavishment of tiny daisy-like weeds—
might be robin’s plantain, hairy fleabane,
flourishing wherever there’s ditch, seep,
margin, scarp, its center a yellow smudge,
its scruffy petals mostly a dingy white—
but my three-year-old christens them pink
flowers, and so they are. Pink flowers
everywhere we go, no matter how many
he’s picked, loaded into his sand bucket,
here are pink flowers, new every morning
like mercy, never ceasing, between dirty
creek and greenway, pink flowers that
he names, gathers, delights in, shows
to the walkers we pass—two gray-haired
women in tracksuits, man with Pekinese
riding in the wagon he tows. I picked
these, beautiful, the boy says, the people
he stops admire his findings, we chit-chat,
we forget we’re strangers. When they turn
to go, he calls after them his blessing,
have a good pink flower day, and it is so.
