| I’ve made a Spring bouquet for you, my love, of gorse. ‘Harsh!’ you’ll recoil. ‘For this harsh time?’ Yes, and not yes. It’s true, gorse is a glove of blood for any hand, a paradigm of touch-me-not, a keep-your-distance hedge. Gorse ‘bears it out even to the edge of doom’, endures, defends, fends off the slightest touch. Why? For the sake of its exotic bloom: a golden purse, sheathed in pistachio green, that flings its riches to the cloudy skies till Ireland swoons, drenched in a heady rain of tropical perfume, a paradise. I will be gorse while we are kept apart, with you The Land of Spices in my heart.
|
| Bio & Link |
| I am a writer, living in Ballycastle, County Antrim. In the lockdown, the most abundant flowers around me are those of the beautiful but hard-to-handle gorse. I am very aware of separation in this period so I wrote this sonnet, hoping someone might find it expresses the difficulty of this period but also that nothing, ultimately, separates the lover from the beloved. http://angelagraham.org/ |