Hey Nina, did you hear the interview with Salman Rushdie on the New Yorker Radio Hour? It’s so great. The more I know about him, the more I love him! (You can find it on:
Where they came from and returned to, I know not, only that they, with their silent velvet six-legged gossamer-winged beauty, captured my dreams. In that last shimmering summer before my overfed neighbor decided to chainsaw his fir garden down to black dust so he could house his boat trailer, thus laying bare my yard to the ravages of the dying sun, I cultivated a forest of giant daisies. “They’re not flowers, they’re weeds,” my neighbor cautioned, “get rid of them!” Instead I irrigated them, my puny resistance to a world of steadily encroaching glossy machinery. Tall they grew, full and gracious, their brilliant white petals opening to light and love, making a tropical jungle of former lawn. That last morning, late in August, when I emerged from my lair like the bears of spring, I could water them no more: each of the three hundred lofty blooms had become a bed for a sleeping bumblebee, drunk on love of nectar. I passed by silently, drowning in dew, counting. Mid morning they awakened, stretched, and buzzed slowly away, tickling my synapses and capillaries as they swept past me in pairs.
Hey Nina, did you hear the interview with Salman Rushdie on the New Yorker Radio Hour? It’s so great. The more I know about him, the more I love him! (You can find it on:
www.wnyc.org
Click on “schedule” and then on whatever show you’d like to hear.)
Thank you for attaching the entire poem: talk about stunning! So moving. Turned me inside out. Oh lord, another writer to fill my cup with!
Where they came from and returned to, I know not, only that they, with their silent velvet six-legged gossamer-winged beauty, captured my dreams. In that last shimmering summer before my overfed neighbor decided to chainsaw his fir garden down to black dust so he could house his boat trailer, thus laying bare my yard to the ravages of the dying sun, I cultivated a forest of giant daisies. “They’re not flowers, they’re weeds,” my neighbor cautioned, “get rid of them!” Instead I irrigated them, my puny resistance to a world of steadily encroaching glossy machinery. Tall they grew, full and gracious, their brilliant white petals opening to light and love, making a tropical jungle of former lawn. That last morning, late in August, when I emerged from my lair like the bears of spring, I could water them no more: each of the three hundred lofty blooms had become a bed for a sleeping bumblebee, drunk on love of nectar. I passed by silently, drowning in dew, counting. Mid morning they awakened, stretched, and buzzed slowly away, tickling my synapses and capillaries as they swept past me in pairs.