Assistant Editor Emily Rose Cole: Dion O’Reilly’s “Posies” is a poem of dark juxtapositions, where the presumed softnesses of childhood are sharply tempered by violence and neglect. Like the title, the second half of the poem invokes the medieval-era nursery rhyme “Ring around the Rosie,” which some folklorists believe originated when the Black Death, with its rose-red rashes, swept through Europe. O’Reilly’s leap from childlike vulnerability to the terror of plague feels both timely and uncomfortably timeless. The poem’s emotional turn hinges on my favorite line, the declaration that “Oh, childhood is a crown / worn forever.” Not just a crown of posies, this poem suggests, but a crown of briars, too.
To hear Dion read her poem, click below:
Posies
I was a botched child
in a land where children dropped
from the sky like snow. Were left
unguarded for wounded lions.
Even at the kitchen table spooning sugar wafers I hunted
for my face on a milk carton wanted
to be someone the world searched for.
I’d run around with a net
place butterflies in jars.
Like old parents they softened and died.
Pinning a thorax in a box was my reward
for suffering a way to stay alive.
Oh, childhood is a crown
worn forever.
Holding hands with friends I spun
screaming songs
with no apparent meaning. You see
over a thousand years ago there was a plague.
Dogs ate the dead out of pits.
Children can’t stop singing about it.
Dion O’Reilly’s book, Ghost Dogs, was published in February 2020 by Terrapin Books. Her work appears in Poetry Daily, Narrative, Massachusetts Review, New Letters, New Ohio Review, and The Sun. She leads workshops in a farmhouse and is a member of Hive Poetry Collective, which produces podcasts and events.
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