Abscissa

NaPoWriMo April 19:  to write a poem—possibly a 5-lined stanza like Florilegium by Sylvia Legris—in which you muse on a flower’s name and meaning.

Well, I thought abscissas were flowers. They are not. The abscissa is the horizontal x-axis, and the ordinate is the vertical y-axis on a standard two-dimensional graph. More precisely, the abscissa is the first coordinate in a coordinate system, and the ordinate is the second. So there—I’m owning it.

Abscissa, by Elizabeth Boquet

If I had to go back to that math class,
I’d insist on playing the part.
of the abscissa,
remain horizontal,
and let the vertical Ys feed me grapes.

Photo by Bozhin Karaivanov on Unsplash