Edible

floral week — poem #1

Squash blossoms from my garden

There’s an overabundance of squash blossoms
in the garden that can’t conceal their orange-yellow
skirts beneath enormous leaves shielding the fruit.
I learn to distinguish male from female and decide
to pilfer some to stuff with cheese

while puzzling over the first person to eat flowers.
I suppose they seemed safer than random fungus
covered in an acrid ooze. My nose wrinkles in
consideration of how a dark, unsightly knob of earth
that might be an ingredient to feed unwanted visitors

could ever be called a diamond in the kitchen.
Could flowers be consumed to ward off disease —
like how George Vanderbilt built a home
in North Carolina to salve his mother’s illness
with fresh, cleansing Blue Ridge mountain air?

Sitting taller startles the towhee tiptoeing
through the garden and it shoos off to locate
breakfast elsewhere, though my garden
does boast some plump, insecticide-free bugs.
Next year will require more flowers, I note,