A Field Guide to Mythological Botany

And yet love’s own death can make
beauty, too, a slain Adonis’s blood
transformed into this field of red anemones.
Hyacinth’s blood blooming into larkspur.
Demeter’s mortal love, Mekon, memoralized
by the poppy. Narcissus’s own self-loving
stare sets a slow death, the body breaking
into daffodils. Love’s eternal life cycle
brings an identical beloved each season.

 — yes, Zeus breathed
a crocus from a bull body, made beauty his net
to catch Europa. But forests come from resistance:
turn your own body into branch and bloom — be
Daphne, Erytheia, Hesperia, Aigle. Underneath
their soil they share sugars, nutrients, hormones,
become one organism reaching to the sky,
its body buried, growing quietly beneath us.