“Every once in a while…there’s a day with an absolute right and an absolute wrong, but those days almost always include body counts.” – Jed Bartlett, The West Wing

To my tongue, honeysuckle tastes fibrous and bitter, like
any common shrub or vine. I only know its sweetness indirectly:
hummingbirds guzzling the nectar like a newborn
her mother’s milk while I sit in the shade and imagine
a branch soaked in honey, my head forced back,
sugar dripping down my throat like a panacea.

I’ve been thinking about moral absolutism,
how in any conflict both sides think they are in the right
though surely one must be wrong and the other right.
And this is the problem: the world is both black and white
and shaded in between; there are 158 species of honeysuckle
and only some are fragrant and colorful. What of the rest?

At the nursery, each plant is neatly labeled.
I choose a healthy-looking Lonicera japonica,
read that its flowers are double-tongued and sweetly
vanilla scented, learn that it’s both an ornamental
and an invasive species. At the register I make a promise
to cultivate a garden where the spider is as beautiful as
the aphid trembling in its web, where crabgrass
is no less right to spread its seeds than I to kill them,
where what’s true is true, what’s false is false,
and humanity depends on rooting out the difference.