by Linda Hillman Chayes

We mourn that other earth when

every day was an outside day, today

my blue hydrangeas bleach in the summer heat,

our lungs work hard to find oxygen.

Antique white hydrangeas,

guzzling water daily even as we drain the coffers.

You are thinner and worry about why.

Remember when we couldn’t wait for summer?

Look at how the flowers balance hope

and too much sun

how they find the life they can find

bloom the bloom they can

how so much adaptation carries us

forward sparring with memory.

You and I spar less and conserve energy

for conversation and creations. Yesterday,

our granddaughter held a watering can, bent

over the flowers for the first time. She couldn’t

keep her hands out of the wet dirt.

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Linda Hillman Chayes is the author of two chapbooks, Not My First Walk on the Moon and The Lapse, both published by Finishing Line Press. Her poems have appeared in Kestrel, American Poetry Journal, Quartet, Westchester Review, 2 Horatio, Wild Roof, and other publications. She practices in New York as a psychologist/psychoanalyst. She co-wrote and co-edited a book, The Voice of the Analyst: Narratives in Developing a Psychoanalytic Identity, published by Routledge Press in 2018.