Our yard (and everything in sight) is so very beautiful, but the forecast is for storms over the weekend and so Darryl took these photos for me while everything looks so gorgeous.

             The Common Names of Flowers


When I weary of the means we have devised
          to inflict, destroy, usurp and sin,
I think on the common names of flowers;
          their pure poetry--
                    Desert Candle, Skaters Waltz, Rock Rose,
                                        Bittersweet,
          their distillation of detail--
                    Foxglove, Snap Dragon, Blue Bonnet,
                              Queen Anne's Lace and Fiddlehead Fern--
          their soft music rolling off the tongue--
                    Hyacinth, Dandelion, Wild Indigo, Jonquil,
                              Periwinkle, Alyssum, Forsythia,
                                        Daffodil--
And all those myriad names for love--
          Sweet William, Forget-me-not, Daphne
                              and every other hybrid rose.

To balance our natures so drawn to ruin,
There is in us a penchant for the pure--
                    a delight for a kind of beauty so fragile, so fleeting--
          that thing in us it takes to name a flower.