Not Just Orchids
The orchid that we paid to bloom
Only did what it was born to do.
It dropped its lovely face,
One fragile sweet expression at the time.
You thought that it was dead, its life consumed
By some mistake of care,
Its stalk a bare reminder
Of what nurturing we had not yet known to do.
The orchid that we thought was doomed
Had simply done what it was born to do.
And then we watched it gather its life force,
And one faint shadow at a time
We watched the course
Of bud to bloom endorse
The truth of only doing as one’s born to do.
And in the fullness of its time its lovely face emerged
To smile on us again,
And in its secret depths to urge
Us on to keep the faith
That even when we feign
That some deep piece of death in us occurs
There will be yet another lovely face
That stirs
From the end of each of our own barren stems.
Like the orchid that we paid to bloom,
It teaches with such quiet lovely grace
That in the end we too are left to face
The truth.
We also will have only done
Precisely what we both were born to do.