

Efflorescence, a guest poem by Dawn Marar



Dawn Marar’s publishing credits include fiction and nonfiction. In 2012, a work of creative nonfiction was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She lives in Delmar, NY.

Efflorescence was a finalist in the contest for the  2011 War and Peace issue of the Chautauqua Literary Journal and was published in that journal.  We’re glad to be able to share her moving work with all of you.

Star Magnolia, photo by Dan Charuk, Taken on May 6, 2009, Bowmanville, Ontario, CA





The tree in bloom takes the woman hostage,
Drugging her with its colossal powder puff.  Peaking

star magnolia tepals* morph into bathroom tissue of a high
school unspooling.  But it’s too early in the spring for a lark

usually reserved for the coach’s lot anyway.
Soon any trace of brilliance will vanish

and the woman will sink back into stacks of books
secured under the watchful eye of the PATRIOT

Act, buried in dust mites.
The petals flutter, surrendering

to Nature, despite a few that
cling as if hot glue gunned

after a dogged winter.  Now the woman sees
scraps of bandages calling up wounds

of the earlier Desert Storm waged in our name
against people whose names we can’t pronounce.

Streaming live public radio announces the Nagasaki
official’s U.S. trip, and before her very eyes

the tepals transform into paper cranes.
By turns, limp, the tepals invoke

the down of goose feathers. One rumpled past
bloom stands out, a dove.  The woman searches

for more symbols of salvation.  Instead,
the detritus of shredded paper

towels, remnants of cleaning rags,
crumpled pages, bone white teeth flood

her mind.  While the blossoms on this perennial formed,
reports from Ramadi bombarded the home front.

She taps, What flowers in Baghdad this week, positions
the cursor, depresses the mouse.  Send Now, a missive

to the gap-toothed boy who mowed her lawn, off
fighting in Iraq. The flowers’ heady fragrance slips

through a crack in the window, smacks of a wake, piercing
dust carried by April winds that permeates the air of her colonial.


“Where have all the flowers gone?” photo by Liu Xu and Hyun Yi, 2011


She walks outside, picks a tepal and raises it to her lips.
For a moment, the woman, who scrubs fruit free

of pesticides, feels liberated and emboldened.
To the Iraqi people–not all of whom feel liberated

and only some of whom feel emboldened.
Then, the stench of industries west of her land

blows east, reminding her no chemical weapons were found.
Her face burns as Bush declares war upon the world.

The following morning she awakes to the rumbling
highway department contraption grinding brush.

She grabs the camera to capture any remaining flowers.
The tepals pale under cloud cover.  Green buds assert

themselves.   The woman stands beneath the canopy
and pinches the rubbery soft skin freshly fallen

from a branch.  It is cool, damp, and surprisingly firm.  Misshapen
now, the tepals no longer resemble their nascent form

as they approached the pinnacle of their days.


* Tepal ; one of the divisions of a flower perianth, especially one that is not clearly differentiated into petals and sepals, as in lilies and tulips.

Tepals, botanical image, labeled photo by Midy Liou [UBC Biology 324 Blog: Lab 8]


[Editor's note:] A little more information for the botanically interested:
Efflorescence is the process of flowering or blooming.  Also defined as an example or result of growth and development.

Botanical definition: A state or time of flowering; anthesis. A gradual process of unfolding or developing.
The highest point; the culmination.  The time and process of budding and unfolding of blossoms.

Mickie Lynn

6 Responses

  1. Mark says:

    “Her face burns as Bush declares war on the world”, LOL, you have to laugh, this is no poem, this is just more left wing propaganda

  2. Mickie Lynn says:

    Mark. Think back to September 11, 2001 and its aftermath. Almost the whole world was in support and sympathy with the US. Did we enlist their aid in dealing with this terrorist attack? No.

    First Bush/Cheney and their administration began a ground war in Afghanistan. Next, President George W. Bush and company invaded Iraq (a country that had nothing to do with what happened at the World Trade Center). Simultaneously he invented a list of so called enemy countries that he called the “axis of evil” so that we could begin what has become an endless “war on terror”

    That’s not propaganda. That’s history. All of those things happened. This poem expresses the feelings of one person who watched it happen in Iraq and over time watched the deaths of over 1 million Iraqi people, the destruction of their lives and infrastructure, the deaths of thousands of US military, and the visible and invisible wounds that at least one order of magnitude more returned with.

    When I first read Dawn’s poem I deeply felt the tragedy of what was done to Iraq and its people. I felt the waste and wanton destruction and decline come home to the United States and our people. In spite of massive protests before the invasion of Iraq began. What also came to mind, although it’s a very different way of saying it, was Pete Seeger’s song: “Where have all the flowers gone?” Specifically the closing line of each chorus: “When will we ever learn? When will we ever learn?”

  3. Mark says:

    [Editor's note from Mickie Lynn] Mark, I hesitated to publish this comment because it doesn’t really respond to the poem or to the dialogue that follows but rather spews out a lot of name calling and accusations directed at the writers of the blog. On further consideration I thought that it was important for readers to get a sense of the results of the fear and generalized hate mongering that has many in the United States defaulting to allowing the option of war and of government secrecy and abuses rather than being willing to try to change policies that cause so much violence and destruction.

    So here is your comment complete and unedited:

    It is dellusional to think you can live in a world without violence or the threat of it and the need to confront it. Confronting violence with appeasement never works, just look at what Hitler did with Britain’s attempt of appeasement, he almost destroyed them.

    There are countless people and governments in the world that would destroy us in a heartbeat if they could. Why don’t they try? Because we have a stronger military than they do pure and simple. Singing songs to them will not change their hearts and minds, their hatred is real and the desire of many is to destroy us.

    You live in a world where there are people who hate us simply for who we are and what we believe. There are people in the world who would kill you without a thought if they believed it would please their God…

    I believe you and others in your organization loath the United States and would welcome a foriegn power overthrowing us, I really believe you would welcome that.
    Every blog (or guest blog) posted on here is filled to overflowing with anti-American sentiment and hatred for this county. You blame the United States for every ill in the world (correction, you blame conservatives in the United States, liberals get a pass).

    So, let me ask you, why do you live here? Why do you even want to be a citizen of the United States if everything we do is evil? Why not move to Iran or Iraq or Afghanistan
    or one of the places you seemingly love. It’s easy to sit behind the protective walls of the United States and throw stones, why not move to one of these countries and put action to your high sounding philosophies? for more than a 2 week stay at a posh hotel in the middle east.

    What hypocrisy!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

    To quote another music icon how about Bob Dylan’s line from the song Sundown on the Union. “Democracy don’t rule the world, you’d better get that through your head, this world is ruled by violence but I guess that’s better left unsaid”

  4. Jango Davis says:

    The poem seems to lack any meter and the two line stanzas seem arbitrarily cut up. Take for example the following couplets:
    and only some of whom feel emboldened.
    Then, the stench of industries west of her land

    blows east, reminding her no chemical weapons were found.
    Her face burns as Bush declares war upon the world.

    The author starts each couplet off with a sentence that begins in the middle, or rather is continuing a line of thought begun in the previous couplet. This “technique” pervades the poem and makes it difficult for the reader to follow the poem.

    Finally, the poem is pointlessly long and provides no rhetorical devices to help the reader remember the poem and the message.

    While I agree with the politics behind the poem’s message, I find the poem pedantic and lacking in any internal structure. It is not a very user-friendly poem, to say the least.

    Further, the use of the word “Efflorescence ” is far too obscure a word to have any impact on probably 99% of the readers. A poem must connect to the readers, using obscure words for titles that most of your readers will not know puts a distance between the poem and the reader.

    Additionally, a more widespread use of Efflorescence comes from chemistry and regards the loss of water (or a solvent) of crystallization from a hydrated or solvated salt to the atmosphere on exposure to air.

    Finally, while I do agree with the political sentiments behind the poem, and am a liberal progressive myself, the use of poetry to spread a political message is in fact the VERY DEFINITION OF PROPAGANDA.

    Mickie Lynn: Your false assumption regarding propaganda is that propaganda is by nature false. As in your comment to Mark: “That’s not propaganda. That’s history.”

    Propaganda does not mean the message is false, it means that the manner in which the message is being distributed is designed for a psychological impact to the effect of undermining the opposition. So, this poem is in fact a model of propaganda, particularly in that the poem was a finalist in the contest for the 2011 War and Peace issue of the Chautauqua Literary Journal and was published in that journal.

    Really, Mickie Lynn, what universe do you live in where an anti-war poem, in an anti-war publication IS NOT propaganda? You seem to have a real blind spot here.

    So, while I’m sure Mark and I are on different sides of the political spectrum regarding the war, despite being liberal myself, I do agree, this poem is propaganda, and not very good propaganda.

  5. Mickie Lynn says:

    Jango, Since you called me out by name I first feel a need to say to you personally that I’ve noticed that many of your comments on the TU blog pages tend to be judgmental and critical. That’s a personal style that I don’t find easy to relate to.

    Now to get to the substance of your comment about Dawn’s poem, Efflorescence Obviously this is an anti-war poem, published on a peace oriented blog with no subterfuge or coercion intended. More on this later.

    The poem was not published to invite stylistic criticism but you’re certainly entitled to say that you found this style of couplets difficult for you to read. You’re also welcome to share your own negative feelings about the style that Dawn used.

    I would question you however about the need to resist this way of telling her narrative and sharing her very personal feelings. Would you also criticize the stylistic devices of the poet E. E. Cummings [one of my favorites]? Sometimes making a change in the way that we usually read and dismiss content can arrest our attention and bring us to deeper responses rather than superficial or automatic ones.

    Then I notice that you’ve said that there are no rhetorical devices to make the poem hang together for you as a reader. I beg to differ with you. The floral and botanical images contrasted with the everyday images brought home to me as a reader the destruction of beautiful living things at the peak of their development and expressed the poet’s great distress at the harm done by this ill motivated and devastating war.

    Since the chosen images of beautiful, vulnerable flowers and their human and cultural counterparts make your chemical definition unnecessary I’m not sure why you threw that in. IMO, if another poem were to use the idea of chemical transformation it could also work to convey the same feelings of tragic and inevitable change. I would use some destructive chemicals indeed if I were writing that poem.

    I can’t help noticing that you used the only two overtly political couplets as your example. Thus fueling and perpetuating the attempts to make this a partisan political discussion rather than a response to the poet’s deeply felt sadness about the loss of lives in war, and a sweeping away of a long existing and complex society.

    When I first read Dawn’s poem I felt her feelings deeply but also had to let the poem sit for a while and go back and read it several more times to take in the full spectrum of meaning. Sharing poetry on a blog that usually deals with prose, [although is sometimes augmented with song lyrics, cartoons, images, or art to evoke feeling responses] is certainly a risk and a bit of an experiment.

    It’s interesting to see just what kind of mirror poetry holds up for readers to respond to. I guess that you could say that our blog is a form of “propaganda” in the old-fashioned, literal sense of the word. I mean in the sense that we have a set of principles or values that we share and express in different but consistent ways.

    I was objecting to Mark’s attempts to make the poem into a partisan political statement by using the word “propaganda” in the negative way that implies deception and manipulation. That’s the colloquial definition that we’ve been trained to respond to during the era of our many wars (both World Wars and less defined wars).

    Finally some helpful ideas for reading this poem again in a less judgmental and more receptive way ~~
    I just read this article by a physicist about how he learns from poetry. Here’s a quote that I particularly liked:





    Physics And Poetry: Can You Handle The Truth?
    by Adam Frank
    July 09, 2013

  6. Mickie Lynn says:

    Jango, no regrets but more self awareness about our exchange:

    It’s easy to tap me on the shoulder with a few well chosen words.
    Inviting me to the dance of egos.

    Not as inevitable as the motion of quantum particles.
    But uncertain and unpredictable.