Mine are late again, just thin green spears
poking up from the shady bank,
no bright yellow petals and bells,
but in the yard of the man who has hated me for years,
who once coming down an aisle in a store
aimed his cart right at me, only veering at the end—
in the bark of his immaculate beds
groves of daffodils, forests of daffodils,
are exploding in all yellow and green profusion;
and at the house of the man
whose wife just died of ALS, unable to move, finally,
unable to breathe, but this happening slowly,
inexorably, day-by-day—her gnarling hand the last time
I gave her the Body of Christ canted sharply back
from her wrist, almost perpendicular—
on the edge of their sad and dreary lawn
the daffodils shine as yellow as the sun
a child might paint in school,
smiling down on a Daddy and a Mommy
and a little girl.