Jean McDonough
New Voices Award Finalist
Caring for the Flower of Guernica
In the shadow of a bombed-out building, a dead man clutches a small white flower in his extended hand. The flower sways with each new explosion. A wounded horse writhes on the ground. A woman with pinhole eyes runs through the street. The flower must be planted where it can thrive, but the woman is unable to care for it. She has no interest in the flower’s peculiar arrangement of petals or its lack of a central pistil and stamen. She knows nothing about its life cycle. Why care for a flower if bombs are exploding, and everyone she loves is dead? The woman is focused on saving her own life. Even if she planted the flower in a safe place, the rubble lacks enough nutrients for the flower to grow. Its sickly leaves already struggle under a dim lightbulb, and there is no rain, nothing but the tears of a nearby mother who cradles her lifeless child.
∞
What if more bombs explode? Who will be left to bury the dead?
∞
I break ground with my shovel, certain that the grave on which I stand will never yield—my father was a stubborn and angry man—but the earth gives way easily, and I am unexpectedly confident, even exhilarated. None of the cemetery rules displayed on the caretaker’s shed prohibit me from digging up a grave, and no one seems to care about this empty rural field. The dead already endure limp American flags, faded plastic flowers, and brown wreaths with withered ribbon. Nevertheless, when I pull back a dense mat of grass roots and unearth worms rolling in damp clumps of soil, all the loose dirt slides back into the hole. Impatiently, I set aside my shovel and claw at the ground. What am I hoping to find? Can anything survive so much anger?
∞
A single mud-splattered ceramic teacup rests on top of one of the gravestones, waiting to collect rainwater. Is this what it means to be eternally at peace?
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It has taken me years to reach such a tired and worn-out place.
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A few weeks earlier, I wandered the woodlands of northern Illinois, comforted that spring had finally arrived after such a long winter. It was April again. I looked down along the muddy trail and noticed a small white-petaled ephemeral—bloodroot—pushing up from the dense litter of twigs, evergreen needles, and rotting leaves. Having no better example of the resilience of nature than my father’s futile attempts to control the frenetic growth of flora on his two-acre property, I was reminded of the dead man in Picasso’s Guernica who clutches a flower similar in mettle to bloodroot. I reasoned that if such a seemingly inconsequential fragment of this horrific painting could imitate enduring life and lasting peace, surely it was possible for my life in this world to imitate a great masterpiece.
∞
I would finally visit my father’s grave.
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During most summer evenings when I was a child growing up in Wisconsin, my dad would shake his head in frustration after supper and stomp to the garage, muttering: I'm way behind with the lawn. I've gotta get going before it gets dark. Rather than turn on a baseball radio broadcast and relax on the back porch, he climbed on his lawnmower and rode concentric circles farther and farther from our house.
∞
As an adult, my father gave me walking tours of his lawn, pointing out places where he had recently planted white pines, fertilized his lilacs or pruned leggy petunias. Despite my father’s great pride in his land, I was often disturbed by his black-and-white tendency to turn against anything that did not conform to his narrow expectations. When he abruptly cut down a thriving old maple tree because he no longer wanted to rake its stunning, dinner plate-sized leaves—I quickly learned it was best not to inconvenience him.
∞
The ghostly flower continues to bloom, despite the surrounding flames and dark plumes of smoke. Its translucent petals flutter like moths drawn to light. During another explosion, one of the petals loosens, dangling precariously over the dead man who clutches its slender stem. The flower sways in the wind. The light dims, and the petal falls.
∞
Some say the flower symbolizes peace, but I can hold anger just as tightly in my fist.
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It has always been easy for me to overlook the small white flower in Guernica. Peace seems inconsequential in the chaos of the world; and, truthfully, when I meditated on the painting during the five years following my father’s death, I often felt hopeless. I tried to comfort the mother cradling her dead child. I tried to save a woman trapped in a burning building, but there was still suffering and death. I was angry at the sun. It did nothing but peer down on everything wrong with the world. The wooden table still morphed into a raging bull. Whenever he stomped in his fragile pen, I sifted the lingering dust in my hand, and wondered: What could possibly survive so much anger? The city was destroyed. People were desperate. Someone would snatch that tiny flower from the hand of the dead man—there was nothing else to eat.
∞
My father planted trees and shrubs to protect us from a world that was threatening to him. A honey locust loomed over our back porch, sheltering us from the afternoon sun. Blue spruce formed triangular huddles, blocking car headlights from sweeping across our land at night, and an imposing white pine stood at attention where squirrels stole birdseed from his pole feeder. A long line of apple trees pressed against our barbed wire fence. Fruit fell to the ground and rotted, serving as makeshift missiles that my father threw across the fence at the neighbors he hated—and they threw back at him.
∞
The remaining petals unfurl beneath the cold gaze of a dangling lightbulb. They are welcoming hands reaching out to strangers from distant lands, but the soldier—he tightens his grip on a sword. Is it possible to hold both a flower and a sword at the same time?
∞
Perhaps the incongruity of peace and war is why the petals look like they have been haphazardly glued back on the flower. Did the woman with pinhole eyes find them scattered on the street? Did she gather up the petals in the folds of her dress and reattach them to the wavering stem? She must have struggled. The childlike flower has no center on which the petals can be safely secured to the plant. There are no pistils or stamens to propagate future generations. The flower will never hold together in a strong wind or rain.
∞
Even if the sky in Guernica is cleared of warplanes, and soldiers lay down their arms on the dusty ground, even if all bombs are defused in the far-flung world, peace will still be a challenge. As the modern philosopher Baruch Spinoza once said, “Peace is not mere absence of war but is a virtue that springs from force of character,” and so it is easier to trample the Guernica flower out of fear, ignorance, and prejudice than to do the hard work of creating a quiet field filled with such a delicate species, each turning its head toward a life-giving sun.
∞
If the sun set behind the trees before my father was finished mowing the lawn, he would switch on his headlights but continue to wear his sunglasses because they protected him from gnats that swarmed around his body. He was careful when he cut close to the tree branches—they whipped him in the face if he didn’t lean away—except when his lawnmower broke down, and a neighbor walked over to help him. My father yelled at the man for trespassing on his property, and the man returned to his house.
∞
Is there anything we can be certain of when it comes to peace?
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If I continue to dig deeper into the ground, my shovel will eventually hit concrete—my father’s burial vault. It would take time to dig a hole large enough to remove the reinforced cover and breach his coffin, as if that were even possible. What would I find after five years? A vast ecosystem of microorganisms likely thrived on his body, sustaining not only the grass covering his burial plot, but the roots of trees similar to that majestic maple he once cut down.
∞
The graveyard dirt is cool in my hands.
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In Guernica, there is a broken arrow where the heart of the soldier once beat in his chest. The arrow points at everything wrong with the world, but does it really matter whether the small white flower emerges from a seed blown in the wind or if a soldier unknowingly carries the seed a great distance on his mud-caked boot? Peace is peace. The flower still grows.
∞
We all want peace. We have an idea of how it should be achieved, but our long list of demands is counterproductive. We cling too tightly to the idea that peace must be a small white flower in a painting—that it must be this or that—but peace can really only exist independently of our demands.
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I am the woman with pinhole eyes. I am the one who pulled off one petal at a time from the flower and threw it in the street. I allowed fate to determine what my heart could not accept.
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He loves me. He loves me not.
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My shovel hits a small stone. I pick it up and turn it in my hand. Then I drop it in my coat pocket. I might as well be opening up my heart to examine what is still there, except that the very edges of my body have blurred into nothingness. I am only aware of the uncomfortable pressure of dirt under my fingernails. The grave is yielding, but am I looking down on my father—or up at myself?
∞
Now when I look at the dead man, I realize that I have been wrong all these years. Whether this recent interpretation of Picasso’s painting is the result of my own maturity or merely an optical illusion, I see the small white flower differently. The man is not really holding the flower in his cold, outstretched hand—only a broken sword. The flower is actually growing alongside his clenched fist.
∞
The dead man had a choice. He chose the sword.
∞
It had been absurd of me, even childish, to assume that I could hold both peace and hate in the small space of my heart. I have also been given a choice. What will I choose?
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I set aside my shovel and reach for the potted flower that I purchased at a local garden store. I pull the tangled root ball from its flimsy plastic pot and carefully center it in the hole that I have dug in the damp earth, filling in the gap around the roots with dirt, and gently tamping it down with my bare hands. Is that my father reaching up to grasp what he could never understand?
∞
The quivering perennial is clearly at the end of its bloom. Its color is fading. Even the edges of the petals are dry and withered, but this was the only spring ephemeral that I could find in such a small rural town. It will never survive a hard rain or even a windy day in the field. The petals will scatter. The cemetery caretaker will set his blade low and mow over the remaining dry leaves and drooping stem; and yet, despite the seemingly insurmountable challenges of this graveyard, I am confident of a peculiar haunting between worlds: what has taken me years to cultivate in this forsaken field, this painting, this heart, still surges, a mindset of benevolence that reaches for whatever dim light it can sense that season. It pushes up from the cold spring, the darkness. It rises steadfast with the dead and the living; there is no barren ground.
Jean McDonough is a school librarian with an MFA in poetry writing from the University of Michigan.