Monday Quote
“The flower is always the bud’s undoing.”
Pavithra K. Mehta
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Kate Morgan Reade: This reminds one of images of resurrection in Paul's letters, where the seed is sown, dies, and the plant is a symbol of resurrection.
Pavithra K. Mehta writes, too, of the "skeleton flower," an image similar to the flower being the undoing of the bud.
The skeleton flower is quite aerie and beautiful, and Pavithra Mehta writes of her spiritual troubles during a terrible season of life-threatoning cancer:
https://thepoetryof.blog/author/thepoetryof/
"It intrigues me before I know anything about it. The skeleton flower. * * * A contradiction in terms. Flowers fill the air with the fleshy scent and abundant promise of coming fruit. Skeletons conjure up death, desiccation, dry bones. * * * I think of Persephone and Hades. Another uncomfortable pairing, with its own haunting allure. Perhaps her bridal bouquet was a posy of skeleton flowers.
"Before I was diagnosed with cancer, Spring sang in my body like a river of flowers. Then the river turned treacherous. After the diagnosis, I began to drown. Each chemo treatment dragged me into the underworld. Reliable, and implacable as the turn of seasons. Light had never seemed cruel before. Now its absence felled me with a violence both casual and indifferent. In the depths of winter who can console Demeter or her daughter? Salvation, I would learn, cannot be hastened. Some things only come clear after the Earth has spun around its axis an undisclosed number of times. Meanwhile the seesaw barter never ceases. This endless trade of light for dark, and dark for light, as old and inescapable as orbit."