Apr

16

Just Dandy.

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

April 16, 2008 |

What do gardeners and people who are obsessive about their have against dandelions? I’ve never understood it. Just because they’re common doesn’t make them any less beautiful, and there’s something incredibly fun about blowing away the seed-heads. Don’t forget all the various ways to cook dandelions too–they’re delicious. A lot of flowers have been celebrated in poetry, so I went looking for tributes to the dandelion. Here’s one by Kathleen Flenniken, from her book Famous:

What I Learn Weeding

A dandelion root can grow two feet long.
You don’t forget unearthing one—shocking
as a donkey in an old French postcard.

But mostly, love, we pull their heads off
to achieve our shallow vision of a garden.
The root cleaves to the darkness,

the same dark that sets our hips to rocking,
to burrowing into the other’s body
or slapping it away. Briefly a stillness,

a long waiting to rise. Respiration. Sleep.
Until, without nurturing, a green shoot,
a thumb raked lightly across a thigh

and we succumb to this buried fury, this fever
to reseed. Oh, subterranean marriage
of root and soil! Oh, saw-blade leaf

and sunburst of maddened flower!


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