lilacs bring white floaty dresses and navy pants and bowties while the first sun of spring into summer warms the heads of the children paired up in lines weaving down from the schoolyard and up past the rectory and onto the drive to the great granite stairs of the church where we gather with bouquets and singing like mockingbirds in languages learned by their sound

lilacs are the scent of the the crowning of may queens made of white marble and washed by the rain for this day of remembering and honoring mothers whose sons may die in a bloodspray of bullets or a single lance to the heart