By Betty Miller Conway
September has finally arrived on the farm accompanied by a chorus of insect song and a profusion of flowers announcing the end of summer. September is one of my favorite months here in the mountains—it features the warm days of summer but without its fiery thunderstorms, and it rivals the beauty of October without its leaf-fall heartbreak. The days are quiet, the nights cool and calm. I love how the soft breeze ruffles the tops of the tall grass and whispers through the tree leaves like a promise.
And as always, I am in awe of the beauty of the flowers crowding our meadows and transforming even the most ordinary creek bed or ditch into a lush garden. The mountain sides are covered with daisies, ironweed, goldenrod, and black-eyed Susans. Delicate Queen Anne’s Lace and blue-lavender chicory fill the donkey pasture while Barton’s old barn showcases the first sleepy, nodding sunflowers along its back wall. Closer to the house, marigolds burst out of their containers with the colors of sunset, and the last lilies of the season weave an untidy orange path to the front door. It is as if the flowers are blooming their hearts out for one final month before frost.
It’s hard to fully capture the beauty of the bloom in prose; instead I’m offering a simple poem about one of my favorite flowers of the field—the modest lily.
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THE DAY LILY
“Consider the lilies how they grow: they toil not, they spin not; and yet I say unto you that Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.” —Luke 12:27
She’s no violet, pressing her velvety softness shyly against a spring-warmed boulder.
Nor is she a climbing rose, tumbling over the grey fences of summer in a pink waterfall.
She is a lily—
Common, hardy, often forgotten—
Bordering the yards of abandoned home places,
Spilling over into the fields in a ragged line,
An escapee, dancing jubilantly with the wild daisies.
Littering roadside ditches with slivers of orange sunshine,
No mowing machine can keep her down.
Knobby, gnarly, woody-brown bulbs
Holding the earth together
On hillsides too steep to plow,
Green stems pushing through rocks and dirt
Too poor to grow beans or corn or tomatoes.
Unacknowledged and undeterred,
She shoots straight up into the heavens
Her own glowing star.
© Betty Miller Conway, 2020
