Going back to the old way, the comments are after the poem--and so are a couple pictures of some flowers.
Surviving July
A trembling ball of deep red sun
Rises below the moon.
Its heat may once have warmed the soul,
But not since early June.
The birds who sang from wire and post
Hide in the thickest hedge.
The glossy fields of blue-green grass
Are prickled now with sedge.
The Queen Anne’s lace stands elbow high
And sneezeweed lines the trail
With yellow blooms on feathered stems
And a most bitter smell.
The spiders, too, have moved their webs
Down nearer to the ground,
And there they sparkle, wet with dew,
As if the weeds were crowned.
And, look, among those creeping vines,
A purple bellflower blows,
Sticking its tongue out at the world
And tickling its nose.
And here’s a blue coneflower bloom
Twitching in dawn’s damp breeze,
Baring a blue bright as the sky
And deeper than the sea’s.
Perhaps, we can survive July
And its oppressive heat
By turning our eyes from the sky
To see what’s at our feet.
Okay! According to the wonderful plant identifier at Pl@nt Identify (https://identify.plantnet.org/) the flower above is the American Bellflower (37.6% likely). It is a tiny, tiny flower that I found growing around the base of a rock covered with ivy at Mammoth Spring State Park. When I say tiny, I mean, this bloom was about the half the size of a standard shirt button. I am really zoomed in on it.
Pl@nt Identifier said the blue flower above was most likely a blue coneflower, but it could also have been chicory or something else. I think it is a blue cornflower based solely on the shape and length of the stem.
The "sneezeweed" referred to in the poem is also commonly called bitterweed. According to the Missouri Department of Conservation, it is called bitterweed because when it blooms in the summer dairy cows milk becomes bitter even though cows will eat very little of it. If you have ever had a milk cow, you know what they are talking about. I did not take a picture of bitterweed, otherwise known as sneezeweed, but if you live in Arkansas, you know what it looks like and smells like. Yep! That is the one.
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