The Darwin Flower

An anecdote can become
A parable, if you choose.
Supposedly, Charles Darwin,

As a schoolboy, came to class
One day with a garden flower
And the mistaken notion

That his mother had told him
If he stared at the center
Long enough, it would tell him

Its name. He and his friends stared
With great concentration, but
The flower, for its part, stayed mum.

The mistake seems to have been
Confusion from a lesson
On the Linnaean system,

In which one counts the stamens
To know the type of the flower.
The system contains the name.

So much for the anecdote.
Now bring the system to bear
To create a parable.

The world’s as full of riches
As a tangled bank of flowers,
But the flowers have no meaning

And will never speak their names.
The world’s as full of meaning
As human naming makes it.

The naming’s not inherent
Except to human systems.
A flower is full of meaning

Made of your names and stories,
And you can add more meanings—
Fables of flower origins,

Mythologies of martyrs
And demigods explaining
A flower’s blood red or snow white,

Or order your myths by traits
And sexual strategies
In a story of one God’s

Elaborate creation,
Any magnifying glass
Will help you peer and confirm.

Oh, there’s an infinity
Of meanings that could attend
To any wildflower. It’s just

That the flower itself will not
Speak any of them to you.
Flowers have other things to do.