Lesson on Flowers

The flower opens
without violence. This is what
I learned in elementary
how resistance lives
in softness.

I stand in the kitchen, watching
petals drift into my teacup,
thinking of mother’s hands
folding white sheets,
how they will yellow
with time. Everything pale
becomes something else.

In dreams, I am not
this daughter who changes
without permission. I am
the space between what she
saved and what she lost.

She told me once:
to preserve a flower
you must kill it carefully.
Press yourself between two
worlds until you become
something else entirely.

But morning traces
each inherited gesture,
the light enters the body
and makes it transparent,
some things they couldn’t
take away.

I have studied the process
of transformation:
cell
membrane
chlorophyll
decay

These are not separate things.

When the flower falls
it becomes earth again.
When we change
we are most ourselves,
a theory of perpetual
becoming.

This morning, I found
white petals in my hair,
not knowing how they got there.
Perhaps I too am blooming
into something
I never meant to be.

This is not violence.
This is not preservation.
This is the body
remembering its first
truth: change.

-Stafford Challenge 2025