I took a shovel to the tawny daylilies
I took a shovel to the tawny daylilies
that doubled in number every year.
Nothing else killed them — though they played dead.
Each autumn I took down their dried stalks,
grey-white like bones.
Now I pried up the roots, each one knotted
like a dead man’s fist.
Thinner roots spread like arteries and veins
through the ground.
Each plant was connected, a hive mind.
In the tangle of thickest roots were
orange tubers, like tiny sweet potatoes.
That was their immortal secret:
They could be cut down by spade or drought,
but rose again like a phoenix.
I uprooted them and planted marigolds,
delicate but ungreedy, in their wake.
I spared just one daylily,
since its orange flowers always bloomed
on the first day of summer.
