"Wallflowers" by Donna Vorreyer

Wallflowers

I heard a word today I’d never heard before—

I wondered where it had been all my life.

I welcomed it, wooed it with my pen,

let it know it was loved.

They say if you use a word three times, it’s yours.

What happens to ones that no one speaks?

Do they wait bitterly,

hollow-eyed orphans in Dickensian bedrooms,

longing for someone to say,

“yes, you…you’re the one”?

Or do they wait patiently, shy shadows

at the high school dance,

knowing that, given the slightest chance,

someday they’ll bloom?

I want to make room for all of them,

to be the Ellis Island of diction—

give me your tired, your poor,

your gegenshein, your zoanthropy—

all those words without a home,

come out and play—live in my poem.

                                   

—Donna Vorreyer

 

            When I first read the title of the poem, “wallflowers,” I thought of sunflowers because it was the first thing that popped into my mind and the word wallflower seems bright and cheery to me, which is something that a sunflower can represent. Then there’s the word wallflower as a description of someone that stands off to the side and can blend in with the wall. I think the poem will be about celebrating the wallflower and overcoming that identity.

            This poem wasn’t quite what I thought it would be; it was about words, more specifically, about new words being used in a vocabulary. The author wonders if words wait desperately to be chosen or if words feel unused or unloved; however, at the end, the author also wants to take in all the words and make them feel wanted and loved.

            I looked up the vocabulary words that I was unfamiliar with and came up with the following definitions:  gegenshein—a faint light about 20° across the celestial sphere opposite the sum probably caused by the backscatter of sunlight by solar-system dust; zoanthropy—a kind of monomania in which the patient believes himself transformed into one of the lower animals.

            I really liked how the author personified words by comparing them to orphans that want more than anything to be picked and cared for by someone else, or that words are like the shy kids at a dance, waiting their turn to have a dance with someone. This analogy really helped me see that the author is trying to get the audience to use new words and expand their vocabulary by welcoming them in because the author makes the audience pity the words and have the words be the puppy dog eyes you just can’t resist saying no to.