Beside the front steps <br />of my boyhood schoolhouse <br />bloomed a fuchsia <br />rich with fascination, <br />its crimson flowers <br />splaying pointed petals <br />above the vivid purple <br />silks and pistils, <br />exotic, sensuous— <br />suspended dancers <br />swaying in the dark <br />green of the leaves. <br /> <br />Yet it was not <br />these opened blossoms, but <br />the taut plump buds that <br />tempted finger and thumb <br />to squeeze them till they <br />popped and split, exposing <br />intimacies, one way of <br />cheating time <br />by hurrying it to <br />open a rapture <br />it had not <br />intended to occur <br />just yet, intent upon <br />a patient growth <br />towards maturity, <br />but I, part brute, - <br />part sensualist, and maybe <br /> <br />part instructor, <br />could not wait for time <br />and its disclosures, <br />and took a kind of <br />pride in popping fuchsias, <br />changing potential into <br />actual, as <br />eventually all boyhood <br />must, and yet <br />each time I popped a <br />bud I felt a kind of <br />qualm, as, surely, <br />all of us must feel, <br />hurrying time along <br />and popping fuchsias.<br /><br />Robin Skelton<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/popping-fuchsias/
