Tennessee through all the too-hot months

is a lavishment of tiny daisy-like weeds—

might be robin’s plantain, hairy fleabane,

 

flourishing wherever there’s ditch, seep,

margin, scarp, its center a yellow smudge,

its scruffy petals mostly a dingy white—

 

but my three-year-old christens them pink

flowers, and so they are. Pink flowers

everywhere we go, no matter how many

 

he’s picked, loaded into his sand bucket,

here are pink flowers, new every morning

like mercy, never ceasing, between dirty

 

creek and greenway, pink flowers that

he names, gathers, delights in, shows

to the walkers we pass—two gray-haired

 

women in tracksuits, man with Pekinese

riding in the wagon he tows. I picked

these, beautiful, the boy says, the people

 

he stops admire his findings, we chit-chat,

we forget we’re strangers. When they turn

to go, he calls after them his blessing,

 

have a good pink flower day, and it is so.