A Dying Beauty

A flower by any other name would smell as sweet.
Light perfume and England in the wintertime,
a forgotten figurine.
She whispers to me now,“Come, the storm has ceased.”
And I hold her as though crying child,
fragile yet fractured.
On the outside smooth and porcelain,
on the inside loved, lost and lined.
Like so many around me,
beautiful flowers, wilted with humanity’s condition.
She reminds me of adventures,
of days long past, yet close to home.
As a babe she was hand-nurtured and coloured in beauty,
but the chips were down and so was she.
She doesn’t smash as she falls to the floor,
a muffled ‘click’ if she dares speak at all.
Some days she wonders if she is remembered at all.
Others she wishes for an existence more shadowed.
A flower by any other name would smell as sweet,
but I know that a flower’s existence will never be so sweet.