The Flowers Will Not Be Silenced

Here we are in Rome and we are waiting for things to find us, we are looking for something we’re not ready to name, we are hoping, and we are open, listening, looking, learning. But we are tall dumb tourists, too. We feel at home, but we don’t belong. We answered a call to come back to Rome this November after being here last November. We didn’t try to make sense of it but just said yes. To travel is a gift and a privilege. I’m not sure entirely how we’ve swung this. Various choices, as is always the way. And we chose Rome and thought about it as soon as we returned home last year. We looked toward Rome all year.

We knew we were staying near the Campo dei Fiori. We knew there were flowers. This year I find the flowers surprising, even so. This past year in Edmonton, we also lived with flowers in the form of paintings by Rob. And so we’ve been bringing flowers to the apartment we’re renting, and he’s sketched them, and taken photos. Always there will be those who wish to silence flowers, but the artists will remind you that they persist.

Don’t ever weary of gifts, says Amelia Rosselli, in this poem I found on Poetry Foundation.

Everywhere we have gone, there have been flowers. In the garden behind the Corsini Gallery, outside of churches, and hanging from windows, vines, on every street here there are flowers.

And we are drawn back to the Campo de’Fiori nearly every day, to look, if not to buy. There is a poem by Czeslaw Milosz that starts:

In Rome on the Campo dei Fiori
baskets of olives and lemons,
cobbles spattered with wine
and the wreckage of flowers.
Vendors cover the trestles
with rose-pink fish;
armfuls of dark grapes
heaped on peach-down.

On this same square
they burned Giordano Bruno.
Henchmen kindled the pyre
close-pressed by the mob.
Before the flames had died
the taverns were full again,
baskets of olives and lemons
again on the vendors' shoulders.

{Continue reading here}.

In November we arrive at the end of the season. There are a few roses in the gardens though, and we’re happy to bask in the wreckage. We’re happy in the end of a season. We’re happy in the rain.

All I know is that often, what you go looking for is already there. The poem or essay you need to be writing is the thing staring you right in the face. Then you just have to find the words for it. No big deal. You have to gather them all up as you would an armful of flowers, and then arrange the wreckage into a bouquet. It’s messy, and sometimes hard. Trimming the stems with dull scissors, taking off some of the leaves, pinching off the wilting petals. Finding the correct vessel, the vase, to put them in. This one stem longer, that one shorter. Sometimes you have to twist the stem gently so it sways poetically. You twist it carefully or it will break and you’ll hold the severed head of a rose. This colour looks better beside that one. This one leans nicely against that one. That one must go into another vessel, so you fetch it from the bottom shelf. And then, where to put it? By the window in the sunlight? On the humble kitchen table? Should you keep it? Share it? Photograph it? Dip your nose in, and smell? Hide it in your own room on the bedside table? Hoard it for a while. It’s yours to breathe in while you dream.