In my back-pack, I carry a thesaurus
of names I’ve jotted down in my long search
séance-bloom,
trance mushroom,
mind’s-eye flower
prisoner of conscience …
The last name fits because the photo –
this crude colour print, taken with a flash –
shows the orchid spindly-white against
the rufous tone of the forest floor
reminds me of flesh-and-blood, of weakness,
of living burial, of a victim lodged
in the cage of someone’s secret mind.
My other names for the Ghost Orchid are
Lazarus flower,
resurrected Female Christ,
Once-in-Ten-Years
my daughter’s illness …
The last name is because I’ll find her there
beside the pallid, slender flower –
my human exception to the rule
that plants need light, that we must be the same,
must all perform the photosynthesis
that makes leaves green; whereas she was only
a transparent girl, perfectly thin.
© Dilys Wood
Picture 10852001, photograph by John Mason, image copyright Mary Evans / Ardea
Dilys Wood founded Second Light Network of Women Poets in 1994. Her collections are Women Come to a Death (Katabasis, 1997) and Antarctica (Greendale Press, 2008). She has co-edited Second Light’s ARTEMISpoetry and the following anthologies of women’s poetry: Fanfare (2015), Her Wings of Glass (2014), Images of Women (Arrowhead Press, in association with Second Light, 2006), My Mother Threw Knives (Second Light Publications, 2006), Making Worlds (Headland with Second Light, 2003) and Parents (Enitharmon Press, 2000). ARTEMISpoetry is a bi-annual poetry magazine in which all poetry, reviews and articles are by women solely concerned with women’s poetry.
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