Every year around this time
I think of that little boy
with the bright yellow hair
in that book my mother loved,
because she loved everything French,
and wanted me to love it, too. That book
was harder than it looked,
even in English. "What must I do,
to tame you?" asked the little prince,
a boy with yellow hair
who loved a flower, a flower a sheep
might eat if he didn't get home soon. And then
he was gone. My mother's
birthday was just last week, early spring, still cold,
some snow on the ground, that time when suddenly,
impossibly, there's yellow again: the yellowest
yellow there ever was. And then
in a few weeks it's gone. Or just
changed. Not yellow anymore but
green now, just like all the other green.
She's been dead for thirty years
and it was thirty years before that
when she first read that book to me aloud
before I could even read. I looked
at the pictures: a boy with yellow hair
and questions spilling out all over. A hat
that was really an elephant
inside a snake. And an ending
that was very sad, though he didn't die
exactly. He went home.
He loved a flower,
which made that flower unique
among all flowers.
