The Tuft of Flowers

     

I still remember reading the poem for the first time. 
It was beautiful. 
Thought provoking.
Inspiring. 
"Wes!"  I called.  "Come listen to this!" 

He sat on the bed and I read to him from atop the mini elliptical we had crammed in our bedroom closet.  "Read that again,"  he said with a thoughtful, furrowed brow when I had finished.  I read it again.  "Let me see that," he said after my second reading.  I handed him the paperback copy of illustrated Frost poems, recently procured from the DI, and after a brief, thoughtful little exchange (the kind I m i s s), he took the book and walked out of the room. 

His eyesight was starting to suffer from the cancer.  He wasn't sure how much longer he'd be reading.  And so he wanted to memorize things.  Which was a huge feat for his radiation impaired short term memory. 

But in about a month, he had it.  He would quietly practice the poem as he worked around the house.  He performed it as part of our little family devotional on the Fourth of July, 2010. 

When he came home from a significant Huntsman appointment he'd attended with his parents in late August 2010, he told me with heartfelt emotion about how he'd recited the poem for his mother and father as the three of them waited in a private room for the doctor to arrive.  Tears filled my own eyes as I listened, understanding what that moment meant to Wes.  Then, the signature twinkle returned to his eye and he told me he'd negotiated a deal with his dad: that the poem should be shared by the surviving man at the funeral of the other.

When Phil was a few lines into the poem from the pulpit at Wes's funeral, Lucy, sitting next to me in the congregation, lit up, leaned over, and whispered, "Dad's poem!!" 

The Tuft of Flowers

Robert Frost

I went to turn the grass once after one

Who mowed it in the dew before the sun.

The dew was gone that made his blade so keen

Before I came to view the levelled scene.

I looked for him behind an isle of trees;

I listened for his whetstone on the breeze.

But he had gone his way, the grass all mown,

And I must be, as he had been,--alone,

`As all must be,' I said within my heart,

`Whether they work together or apart.'

But as I said it, swift there passed me by

On noiseless wing a 'wildered butterfly,

Seeking with memories grown dim o'er night

Some resting flower of yesterday's delight.

And once I marked his flight go round and round,

As where some flower lay withering on the ground.

And then he flew as far as eye could see,

And then on tremulous wing came back to me.

I thought of questions that have no reply,

And would have turned to toss the grass to dry;

But he turned first, and led my eye to look

At a tall tuft of flowers beside a brook,

A leaping tongue of bloom the scythe had spared

Beside a reedy brook the scythe had bared.

I left my place to know them by their name,

Finding them butterfly weed when I came.

The mower in the dew had loved them thus,

By leaving them to flourish, not for us,

Nor yet to draw one thought of ours to him.

But from sheer morning gladness at the brim.

The butterfly and I had lit upon,

Nevertheless, a message from the dawn,

That made me hear the wakening birds around,

And hear his long scythe whispering to the ground,

And feel a spirit kindred to my own;

So that henceforth I worked no more alone;

But glad with him, I worked as with his aid,

And weary, sought at noon with him the shade;

And dreaming, as it were, held brotherly speech

With one whose thought I had not hoped to reach.

`Men work together,' I told him from the heart,

`Whether they work together or apart.'

Wes's dad spent the bulk of this past year commuting to my northern Utah home from Las Vegas to finish my basement and help fulfil my little preschool dream.  That's a twelve hour round trip nearly every weekend.  He called last fall to tell me he wanted to do that.  Said he just woke up one morning with the feeling that he ought to.  Every once in a while he'd offer me other kinds of help, with the same explanation. 

One day he told with a smile, "I finally figured out who keeps whispering in my ear!  It's Wes!!" 

"Men work together,"  I thought in my own so grateful heart, "whether they work together or apart."