Honeysuckle

by Isabel Joshlin Glaser

 

Honeysuckle crawls crumbling walls
bends upon fences
spills across roadside banks.
An intrepid traveler, wooer of bees
climber of trees, it spins
through shadows and sun
exploring diverse soils.
From cameo-trumpets, its fragrance bursts
drifts into a courtyard
and skims the lily pool.
Honeysuckle everywhere.

It grows with abandon
and yet retains mystique.
I am of the past, it seems to say
entwining broken trellises of deserted houses
seeking out hedges, racing up
the sides of barns and telephone poles.
In the cemetery, where cedars
stand dark sentinel, it wanders
among the moon-cold tombs...
finds your name engraved in granite
and glides out as silent
as any spirit hunting its own...

And so, with the sheen of early dawn
your old rose garden
of late gone to weeds
smells faintly of honeysuckle
and grievous mystery.

 

© 2005 Isabel Joshlin Glaser

Isabel Joshlin Glaser is a former elementary school and high school teacher (English and Spanish). A writer of both poetry and prose for children and adults, she is the author of Dreams of Glory: Poems Starring Girls (Atheneum/Simon & Schuster) and Old Visions...New Dreams (Old Hickory Press). Her work has been published in Greensboro Review, Mississippi Review, Prairie Schooner, Southern Voices in Every Direction, Tennessee Voices, Cricket, Cicada, School Magazine (NSW, Australia), Instructor, Highlights , in many anthologies, textbooks and education programs. She won Memphis Magazine Fiction Prizes in 1992 and in 1994 (for "The Poet Laureate").