Poet Philip Burnham, Jr. writes: “This poem Gardenias from my new book, Winter Dreams (Ibbetson Street Press), is about so many things. When I was asked by a neighbor to take care of her gardenia, it reminded me of my mother’s preference for them and of my own purchase of gardenias when, as an adolescent, I would buy a corsage of gardenia to give to the young lady I was escorting to a dance. The poem, like so many of my poems, is about love and memory and loss. I had not thought of Shirley Kay Morse in years; the woman who asked me to care for her plant has since died and my own efforts to keep it and others have not been successful. Not all of that is contained in this poem, but echoes of those events are and that is what created the poem in the first place.

Poet Philip Burnham, Jr.

Gardenias

On the sun window’s sill an orphaned plant,

Its owner gone to gardens beyond sight

Of her gardenia’s compelling fragrant

Flowers.  They spend their velvet creamy white

Blossom petals over a flight of green

Bright polished leaves. An intimate perfume

Reminding me of adolescence when

Suddenly, there were women in the room,

Whose presence would transform the atmosphere,

But I was an awkward innocent in

Subtle ways of courtship. I would appear

At the door of Shirley Kay who would pin

A proffered gardenia on her  gown

For a formal dance, an odor of love

Arising  between us, its perfect bloom

As transient as would affection prove,

Fragile as those abandoned flowers here.

The petals come to yellow like old cloth,

Their scent remembrance of what once seemed dear,

Of brief encounters in a distant youth.

— Philip Burnham, Jr.

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