Complements

Forsythia suspensa

brighter than sunlight—
high folded blossoms chatter
perched on wet black twigs

Scilla siberica

bluer than water—
pooling blooms wash these green lawns
tide rising each year

Leslie Schultz

Always coming before the leaves arrive, just when we Minnesotans are starved for color, these color wheel botanical opposites thrill and cheer me. This year our back garden is especially lush. (Tim and I agree that on that mythical day when our ship comes in we will celebrate by buying 1,000 new scilla bulbs to colonize the front garden which currently has only one handkerchief-sized patch.) I would also like to plant our own forsythia someday. (I am inspired by ones on our street and dazzled by the ones I saw–glimpsed at in this photograph–recently in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania.)

Until tomorrow!  Leslie