American Life in Poetry

Sun., July 19, 2015

Ted Kooser U.S. poet laureate, 2004-06

Surely, some of you have paged through an old book and come upon a dried flower, fragile as a spider web, the colors faded. Here’s a fine poem about pressing flowers by Chelsea Woodard of New Hampshire, from her book Vellum.

The Flower Press

It was the sort of thing given to little girls:

sturdy and small, round edged, wooden and light.

I stalked the pasture’s rough and waist-high grass

for worthy specimens: the belle amid the mass,

the star shaming the clouds of slighter,

ordinary blooms. The asters curled

inside my sweat-damp palms, as if in sleep. Crushed

in the parlor’s stifling heat, I pried

each shrinking petal back, and turned the screws.

But flowers bear no ugly bruise,

and even now fall from the brittle page, dried

prettily, plucked from memory’s hush.

Poem copyright 2014 by Chelsea Woodard, “The Flower Press,” from Vellum, (Able Muse Press, 2014). Poem reprinted by permission of the author and the publisher. American Life in Poetry is made possible by the Poetry Foundation and the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. We do not accept unsolicited submissions.