Many the wonder of spring
but the jaw-dropping best of them all
is a flower that never had bloomed
until one redoubtable fall.
A lilac in fall?
What could it portend?
Why in that dismal
tormented year’s end?
Pandemic exhausted,
hostility worn,
with leaves curled in death,
dry and forlorn,
we slumped into autumn
weary of strife,
and here blooms a lilac
with anomalous life.
A lilac in fall —
a thing beyond reason —
would it come back again
in traditional season?
The purpling answer
no nose can resist
nods in affirmative
its resolve to exist.
As fancy a flora
as ever hoorayed
exalts this springtime
in new life arrayed.
In my years here, this lilac had never given the slightest indication that it knew how to make a flower. Then, in the last gasps of 2021, it bloomed! An autumn-blooming lilac seemed in keeping with the chaos of the times. But would it bloom in the spring? Now we know!