Fragments From Floyd

The HollyBear Family Tree

I think that there could never be
A thing more peculiar than a Family Tree
Whose roots some trace back to Adam's impediment,
Or others, to slime of Precambrian Sediment

My own branches flow through the young Holly tree
And more fruits like herself now soon there will be
That genes might effect this, we hardly can doubt'em
But my sprouts have managed to get by without'em

Her mother and I weren't prepared for the job
Our First Family nursery was somewhat macabre
We pruned and we grafted, it took so much care
But we managed, at our best, to harvest a Bear

She growled and she scowled if the soup didn't suit,
And now she herself will be tasting that fruit
She'll weed and she'll water and shovel manure
But her little fruitlets just wont listen to'er

They'll send out their tendrils and grow toward the light
In their way, when they please, they won't be polite
Til one day like magic in horror they'll see
The fruit doesn't fall very far from the tree

And so in our times now of former twig-bending
We look up ahead to see our garden ending
But others we've nurtured and their gardening spouses
anticipate tending their own strange greenhouses.

Then we who reside down a notch on the arbor
Give our tools a rest in parental safe harbor
When our kids come visit with several bambini
We'll politely decline, we don't need more zucchini

And many years later, they'll inquire of beginnings
And wonder of their roots and gene-underpinnings
She'll tell them the cause of their rural aberrance:
Their American Gothic maternal grandparents!