White Daisies and Dragonflies

Bryan Gahagan
1 min readMay 7, 2021

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Collage by Bryan Gahagan

For Pasju

A miniture kaiju

The dragonfly is at once

Ancient, mechanical and absurd

Like her heart she thought

Flying, but hovering

Standing still, but wings flapping

Darting, dodging, drifting in the high winds

An anxious insect

Precise in flight,

Aimless in journey,

Alway running, never arriving

Waiting for the whip-snap tongue

Of something unimaginably massive

To consume her

To digest her

To return her to the earth.

A junk flower

Scentless, senseless

To the regal orchard

or a workman rose.

Like his heart he thought

Found in the ditch

Surrounded by weeds

The white daisy perseveres.

Please take my pollen dragonfly

Pollenate the world with blinding light

She loves me. She loves me not.

The heart wrenched leaf by leaf, valve by valve

Just to find an answer to a question mechanical

To a question ancient, to a question absurd.

His heart wants to fly, to hover, to flaps wings,

Dodge, Dart, drift in the high winds.

To replicate into a thousand white daisies.

But in the end, The dragonfly got her wish,

Her heart subsumed by an all-knowing,

All-powerful toad.

And the white daisy heart persisted

And eventually wilted.

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