Sharon M. Van Sluijs
School of Medicine and Public Health, Department of Pediatrics
2019
Poem
Because you insist on loving so desperately
this always transient beauty—
tulip masses breaking into glorious
petaled cups, great phalanxes of daffodils
waving sunny saffron heads and frilled trumpet throats
(as in those famous lines, two hundred years ago),
delicate trout lilies unfurling
above modest mottled leaves, and early
on a week of warm winds, magnolia’s emergent
milky wings, fragrant, fragile and certain to succumb—
because you will cry, forgetting your place,
the place of every other earthly thing, I enter
abruptly, unheralded,
sublime sovereign
for these few hours.