This iris has a story, too.
One day a few years back, I visited a friend in Tiverton RI. She was renting an apartment in a house that had been there for decades upon decades, perhaps as long as a century.
It is next to Fall River, MA, which is mostly a dirty, litter strewn city struggling with poverty and pointlessly unprofitable political corruption.
It is the kind of place with lots of broken windows and boarded up multi-story stone mills interspersed with soon-to-be-bankrupt and empty "renewal projects" financed with loans and grants.
The soul-less decrepitude of the longtime dying mill town and its population overflows across the border like a backed up storm drain burbling sewage into a green park after a long and heavy downpour.
My friend's home and apartment was in a neighborhood just yards from the border. The overflow is heavy there.
She had some items to sell to be photographed. We decided to use the sun for lighting so we set ourselves up outdoors in the sunny, open yard beside the house.
In the side yard was a garden, as old as the house... or nearly so.
The garden was partly overgrown and had seen times when more care had been lavished upon it than had been lavished then.
Irises were blooming... and some other flowers, too. They had been planted long, long ago, had endured many years.
My friend went back inside to swap around items. I had a few quiet minutes in the yard near the garden.
I looked and took a few pictures of the blooming royal-purple iris that had been there for so long.
They had a quiet nobility to them.. to quietly stand so strong, so long, yet to seem sincere and unassuming.
We finished up our photo session and soon I went away.
A few weeks later I returned to visit.
The garden and the iris were gone.
The lot next door had been sold and had been harshly bulldozed to make room for a cheaply-manufactured box intended for human occupation.
The yard was grass in turf squares, poorly placed and soon to brownly die. The green-dyed and dying grass was imprisoned by a shiny, chain link fence.
The yard of this over-sized crate was full of mass-produced, garishly colored, gimmicky ornaments of the sort broken-souled humans tend to fill their sterile, plastic yards.
The iris garden had been churned into bulldozer-tracked mud.
The garden was not even in their lot.
They had heedlessly run across the boundary while plowing up their land with absolutely no care nor clue an overgrown garden would be appreciated or missed.
It was a tiny heartbreak
to see the iris garden
simply was no more.
Noble purple iris,
roots and stalk and blooms
replaced by flashy, trashy gore.
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