Fiona Wright - Poppies, Katoomba

I didn’t come here to write poems about flowers
but there are poppies of palest purple.
Blown open, each petal
cup-shaped, like an empty hand and
every time I travel my chest winds tight:
what kind of creature
cannot take a holiday? In a hotel bar,
I chance upon an old friend of my father
nibbling on sones, he says that as a child
I’d said I want to be alone
with my own thoughts and this winds me,
although I can’t say why. The poppies
are membranous, the poppies are
precarious, the poppies
are bruis-coloured at their centre.
By the time I get the poppies
to my desk
they are bedraggled,
their hard, green hearts
all they have left to show me.

Best Australian Poems 2016