Wallflowers

Wallflowers by Donna Vorrey

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 our tired, you poor,

your gegenshein, your zoanthropy──

all the words without a home,

come out and play──live in my poem.

The first time that I read this poem I had no clue what the author was trying to say! After reading it a couple more times I started to feel that I wasn’t about words but about people that are not necessarily popular or have a family or somebody to that loves them. The second stanza is the one that stuck out to me the most so I am just going to focus on that.

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

What happens to ones that no one speaks?

So I see the “words” that people speak represent the popular or normal people in the world and the “words” not spoken are the people that are different from us. Words that are not spoken maybe are not understood or we don’t think that we need to use them and I think that the people that are different than us we don’t try to understand them, therefore they are not important to us. The second line in the second stanza is my favorite in the whole poem because it makes you think of what you are missing by not using those certain “words”. I believe that the author was trying to say that if we try to understand different kinds of people we will become a stronger person and he does by using the example of words.