A man in black visits, weeps, leaves flowers and never returns. Later a cloud in black arrives and washes the flowers away. The plot is simple, but what makes Wheatgrass007's "Blue Flowers" linger is the voice telling it. The speaker cannot move, feels "the rest decomposes," and finds the roses left "on my bed." The poem never says "grave," but the details point that way: the bed is a resting place, the visitor is a mourner, and the speaker is dead. That reading explains the painful helplessness of "I tried to comfort, say all's alright, / Wipe the tears from his eyes, / But move not could I."
The central idea is that remembrance is fragile, and even love's tributes are temporary. The speaker sees this and says so in a bitter aside: "Funny, the roses are just like me; / As one, we wither and waste away / And fade from loved ones' memories." The word "Funny" does a lot of work here. It is not amused. It is the dry tone of someone who has had a long time, "centuries" by the poem's own count, to think about being forgotten. The visitor's grief is real, but it does not last. He "Never" comes back, "Not even when he dreamed," a phrase suggesting that the speaker has slipped out of his dreams as well as his days.
The most striking choice is the poem's frame. The opening and closing sections mirror each other almost word for word: "Today a man donning black / Came to speak to me. / With the wind to his back, / He let rain his misery." Later: "Today a cloud donning black / Came, ignorant of me. / With the wind to his back, / He let rain his apathy." Only two things change, man to cloud and misery to apathy, yet the meaning flips. The verb "rain" is the hinge. The man's tears fall like rain, and the cloud's rain falls like tears without feeling. By giving them identical outfits and identical phrasing, the poet makes the human mourner and the weather seem like variations of one visitor, one who passes through and moves on. The difference is that the cloud admits its indifference, while the man's sorrow fades without anyone noticing.
Colour carries the rest of the feeling. Blue roses are not something you find in an ordinary garden, so they feel rare, almost impossible, a gift too lovely to last. The speaker says they would have "filled this heart with glee / If not for the call of darker powers," setting joy against a pull the poem leaves unexplained. Elsewhere the speaker moves "towards the light," and the lines that follow ("Revealing empty promises") are hard to untangle. Judging by the imagery, the light may offer a false comfort, or the "promises" may be the visitor's unspoken vow to return. Then comes the fading: "My friend's blue hue has turned to gray / And mine as well." Calling the rose a "friend" is a lovely touch, since it is the speaker's only company.
The form is loose and a little rough. Rhymes appear in clusters rather than a fixed scheme: black/back, roses/decomposes, away/gray, and finally "shower / flowers," which closes the poem with a snap. That last rhyme ties the flowers to the thing that destroys them, so they are bound together even in sound. The syntax often turns backwards, as in "But move not could I" and "Came not empty handed he," giving the poem an old-fashioned, ballad-like tone. Sometimes the inversions tangle the sense, but they also make the speaker sound stiff and stranded, as if even the grammar cannot move freely.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it takes a familiar elegiac gesture, flowers laid for the dead, and tells it from the side almost no elegy takes. The dead person cannot comfort, cannot keep the gift, and can only beg a cloud to "leave us be another day." The cloud does not listen. The poem ends without consolation, leaving us with a small, quiet loss: the tribute is gone, and the speaker is left with only the gray.