For Clara
What should I say to this child
who doesn’t yet know what
a dandelion is? Tell her
it soon will be a deliciously colored carpet,
buttercream, that will cover the entire hillside; tell her
it’ll become buckets of orangey blossoms to turn
into the drink her grandfather loves to sip; tell her
it will one day soon be a perfect white globe,
a seed pod to hold up, to blow on,
then watch the hundreds of feathery seeds go
flying in the wind, flying off & away
to a place only God-knows-where, her
breath doing as God Herself might do if She were here so
that with her childish blowing & doing, she’ll know
precisely what a dandelion is, what God does.
Terry Savoie has had more than four hundred poems published over the past four decades. These include ones in APR, Poetry (Chicago), Ploughshares, North American Review, American Journal of Poetry, and The Iowa Review as well as forthcoming issues of North Dakota Quarterly, Chiron Review, and Tar River Poetry, among others.
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