Even dandelions have backstories,
if you think long enough about your
past. How when you were supple
as their stems, your friend taught
you how to pluck the right ones,
close to the root, find a widened
opening at the base, use your nail
to split the tube in two, and peel.
The first strips, especially if the plant
was more mature, sticky milk along
the ridges already dried from summer,
turned out stiff as ribbon. But newer
buds, those that had not yet forgotten
the earth and still held the acute hunger
things are born with, you tried those
and saw first-hand the miracle: curls
and springs ripe for independent play,
fun, bouncy companions you could
animate, even at an age when you were
unfamiliar with yourself and didn’t know
you had any creative power in you. Any
power in you at all. But even back then,
you had empathy, you did not want
them dying, these curly cues, as you
dubbed them, a fresh revelation amid
unkempt yards and nothing very much
uncommon. You put them in a bowl
of cold water, watched them coil into
themselves, tight lifetimes no longer
bound to soil. And when they turned
brown and your mother told you to
throw them out, you returned them
to the clovered patch they came
from, some early romantic notion
of reintroducing them to their family,
their people, who themselves had
grown different, more beautiful—
white puffs of wishes being made.
Katherine Mercurio Gotthardt, M.Ed., is the author of 12 books and has been widely published in journals, magazines and anthologies since the early 1990s. She has won awards from Prince William County and Manassas Virginia, Poetry Society of Virginia, the Nonfiction Authors Association and numerous publications. Learn more at KatherineGotthardt.com.