Marianne Szlyk

Rose of Sharon

One summer, just after she took out the lilac bushes to appease my aunt, my grandmother planted a Rose of Sharon tree in the front yard.  My brother and I called it the Stick of Sharon because it was just a stick—no leaves, no branches, no flowers.  The Nashua River flowing through downtown was more colorful, turning red, yellow, or green, depending on the dyes used at the mill that day.

The next summer Gram sold the house and moved out to the country with us.

Every so often I Google her old address.  Only two houses remain on Avon Place, a dead-end street less than a mile from downtown and the once-colorful river that will someday be clean enough to swim in.  My grandmother’s house is green now—and the Rose of Sharon, almost the size of the other trees, flourishes.  And the lilac bushes have grown back.  

Originally published in Tic-Toc (an anthology by Kind of a Hurricane Press)

 

The Sterile Hydrangea 

Hard to believe that this flower

turns blue if you put a penny

in the ground, that it is

not a flower but leaves frilling

flowers that only bees find.

Other hydrangeas scent the air

with honey, with vanilla, with

spices as their gardener stoops

beneath them. Easier to think

the hydrangea brings spring like

crocus or forsythia do

on a cold afternoon, the sun

brilliant. You blink to see brown lawns

begin to turn green. Then you will

yourself to wander to the park,

hope for scent, hope for warmth, hope for

spring to last longer this time. 

College Gardens, Summer 2025

Sounds of lawnmowers cloak birdsong.

Exhaust overrides damp green scent

from the grass, reeds, and lily pads.

This is not the swamp I know. This

is a pond. Bubbles surge from pipes.

No algae streams. No thick moss blurs

sharp rocks where snapping turtles hide.

It's too far for me to see fish

or turtles. Is this pond nature

for the woman crossing my path?

Lily pads and purple flowers

are nature. I hear birds shriek

over the hum of a motor

driven by a man who once

lived by rivers whose plants travel.

They float to some place better. 

Like he did. Like he thought he did.