April’s Flower
Unlike the magnificent diamond and the Goddess of Love and War, April’s flower is the sweet, self-effacing and most ordinary of flowers the daisy. It is a wild flower, not necessarily sought after except for the most childlike and most simple of posies often made by children and fun loving folk at a picnic or walking in a meadow 
in Spring. But when we stop to really gaze upon objects as divinities often do, sometimes things that seem at first sight to be of humble origin and not too impressive in stature, become something entirely other and we realize something else. It is that way with the sweet reliable daisy; white, yellow and in all the other colors the daisy is a symbol of innocence and the eternal child within. In ancient Rome the daisy was known as bellis perennis which translated means “forever beautiful.” But bellis is a Latin word that is also derived from the word bellum, which means “war”. The reliable, strong and beautiful daisy was beloved not only because it carpeted the battlefields with beautiful waves of color that denied the horror of war but also because it had healing properties precisely for fallen and wounded warriors. Made into a poultice it can staunch bleeding and reduce bruising and shock; in fact one of the daisy’s cultural folk names is bruisewort. The tender little daisy is also connected with survival and invincibility because of its ability to adapt to almost any environment, climate and soil. You can walk all over a daisy patch and it will come right back at you; you can mow over it and weed it out; the daisy will always return smiling, ever cheerful and always ready for triage when it is needed.