From First Bloom

In the love poem “Love Should Grow Up Like a Wild Iris in the Fields” by Susan Griffin, she uses the imagery of a wild iris growing freely in a field and the contrasting image of a chaotic house filled with disgruntled people. These two imagines show the vast differences in the first bloom of love and the enduring love of a long term relationship. Though love can come as a surprise like an iris in the field, it grows with careful pruning and nurturing. Leaving love untended, it can become unmanageable and wild.

“Love should grow up like a wild iris in the fields, unexpected, after a terrible storm, opening a purple mouth to the rain, with not a thought to the future.” (Griffin 540) If love was what you thought it should be, it would grow like a wild iris, freely and as it pleased. Love would look as beautiful as an iris after a storm. Love, like the iris, would retain all the rain it could so it could grow and become what it was meant to be. Living without a worry in the world about what is to come and enjoying life one day at a time.
Love, in reality, is found in the everyday, mundane living, in the twenty-four/seven tasks of marriage and family. “Love more often is to be found in kitchens at the dinner hour,
tired out and hungry.” (Griffin 540) Love can also be in the midst of frustration and sometimes anger. “While the cook is probably angry, and the ingredients of the meal are budgeted, while a child cries feed me now.” (Griffin 541) Even when money is tight, children are screaming they are hungry and when mom is at the end of her rope, she must continue to hold on and press through, doing it all in love.

Love, like an old coat, “gets taken to the cleaners every fall” (Griffin 541) and gets into the habit of singing “old songs over and over.” (Griffin 541) Love is found in the repetitive tasks of marriage. No matter how many times it has been done, continuing to do it with love in your heart. Falling “on the same piece of rug that never gets tacked down, gives up, wants to hide, is not brave, knows too much, is not like an iris growing wild but more like staring into space.” (Griffin 541) While continuing to slip on the same slippery slope of temptation to give up on love, one must keep climbing back up and holding on, knowing there will be another slip up ahead but all the while choosing to love one another through it.

Love “comes from the midst of everything else.” (Griffin 541) Love is not free, growing wildly as it pleases in an open field free of worry, it is in the middle of a hectic and crazy day when something happens and you remember why love is present between two people. Even when, “like the iris of an eye, when the light is right, feels in blindness and when there is nothing else is tender, blinks, and opens face up to the skies,” (Griffin 541) love cannot see what lies ahead, it is tender and kind, opening itself up for whatever may come its way. Love, in all its many facets, is as beautiful as the wild iris, but as solid as that kitchen table at the dinner hour.

Oct 29, 2009 - Kelly Isner