Scents of Love

For the graduates ~ and their mothers and teachers

 

Change pains us and mother’s pain is deep

Like labor and tears and vast spaces you know she’ll grow into –

 

Pain oft blends with joy as somehow they are one,

Both cut and there is blood because there is love –

 

Like Wordsworth’s daffodils hosts of girls sing and dance

And breathe beneath trees in breezes that blow them to faraway places

And it all begins with flowers –

 

Flowers and girls and flower-girls –

 

And hope and joy and expectation

And no fear and much fear and sighs and

Love active, too pure for dreams.

 

And flowers and girls and flower-girls –

 

And white and wreaths and hair bows large.

Eager eyes and girls on grasses and young meets younger as older looks on

And God said, “It is good.”

 

Good-bye begins with good – all good –

So good-bye to this day and the next and the next –

 

Good-bye here is hello to a newness fresh.

 

My pupils stay forever young but I grow old

And so does she, my only,

Yet all is well

Because all is love.

 

I have smelled the scents of love, they are the scents of spring –

 

Love smells like flowers.

And girls. And flower girls.

For Rainey and all my girls