Poem for the Day: Harvest Festival Dress

Harvest Festival Dress

A church table assigned to spring.

The greatest number of sunflowers, almonds,

beans, you’ve ever seen;

packed in sheaths of wheat, rice,

barley stalks, ascending the altar.

The display is larger this year,

a gathering of strawberries, peas, artichokes, 

a month's work of citrus sweetened in jars.

Impossible to align with comedians, but they are here;

three vases of pink gladioli, some in white

arranged in wisps of maidenhair.

Harvest festival is a day of memory, a choir of children

returning. One girl in apricot, delineated,

arches her heels in black-patent.

All eyes are on her.

She is a flower in a field, hand painted in

bellflower, pink sweet pea.

Her dress demands a signal, a swirl –

stimulating communion with her feet.

Rarely is she chased, except today, flushed

out of hiding from behind the church.

The adrenalin is high in her overreach for glass,

creaming soda dropped to her knees like prayer.

A ruby moonbeam staining her skirt.

Sunlight won't bring it out. 

Mother & Gran each having a turn.

Her eyes burning in their own private fire.

'There's only one way,' the women report,

'two pockets on each side of the skirt

sewn in bellflower, white sweet pea.’

Concealment or words to that effect

before a terrifying end

to a beautiful dress.