Moccasin Flowers
Moccasin Flowers - meaning Summary
Brief Life, Chosen Wonder
The poem sets the beauty of spring flowers against the certainty of death and oblivion. The speaker acknowledges darkness, decay, and the possibility of nothingness, but chooses to value the flowers' brief emergence into light. Their life becomes a model of willing presence: they open, shine, and then return to the forest floor, joining the continuing cycle that produces new trees.
Read Complete AnalysesAll my life, so far, I have loved more than one thing, including the mossy hooves of dreams, including' the spongy litter under the tall trees. In spring the moccasin flowers reach for the crackling lick of the sun and burn down. Sometimes, in the shadows, I see the hazy eyes, the lamb-lips of oblivion, its deep drowse, and I can imagine a new nothing in the universe, the matted leaves splitting open, revealing the black planks of the stairs. But all my life--sofar-- I have loved best how the flowers rise and open, how the pink lungs of their bodies enter the fore of the world and stand there shining and willing--the one thing they can do before they shuffle forward into the floor of darkness, they become the trees.
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