Pansies

The golden pansies nod at me
in the summer breeze, unaware
that their days to please are ending.
I think of a friend who sat down
to dinner with her family
and fell into her daughter’s lap.
Now machines keep her alive
and I wonder if she knows or
if she, like the pansies, dreams
of a Spring that promises
resurrection – when the woman
appears as robust and abloom
as the regal sunflowers who once
were the pansies of late summer.

***

Eileen Van Hook has had poetry published in various literary journals and anthologies including:  “The Writer”; “Stoneboat”; “The Literary Nest”; “The Stillwater Review”; “Chronogram”; “Gravel”; “Edison Literary Review”; “Wordgathering”; “The Serving House Journal” and “Home” among others.  She placed first in a poetry contest in “Writer’s Journal“, is a Pushcart Prize nominee and received an Editor’s Choice Award in the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Contest (2015).  Eileen lives and writes in the wilds of northwestern New Jersey.