... got the magnolia tree that shares its world with mine...
For over a week the flames of its blossom danced at the end of each slender branch; little heart-shaped cups of soft, ice-cream coloured fire. Those passing by, stopped to see this tree that flamed but did not burn and remark, "Your magnolia [as if it ever could belong to anyone but itself] is looking wonderful this year." I would smile, but could take no credit or glory for its beauty.
Then, the other week, the frosts got the magnolia tree and the petals of its blooms became burnt and brown. The slender branches have now become draped in the slimy, brown, wreckage of seaweed wrack; its little fiery hearts, torn and mildewed prayer flags. And now no-one stops to look upon this magnolia tree that shares its world with mine...
... but it doesn't seem to bear the frost any malice. It still stands, holding its broken, rotting flowers up to the sky. Whether pristine or 'spoilt', it makes no odds and so it casts its dead and dying blooms to the wind with as much pride as it flamed its tight new buds of spring. It appears that it is only humans who privilege the 'perfection' of the unblemished over the scratched and soiled, the tattered and the torn. For few of us find the beauty in the imperfect, the half-formed and the spoiled... and so we hide the marks of our precious lives - those etched lines of time and worry and all those scars (inside and out) - with scarves and make-up and a hundred hurried words that have never touched our hearts and make strangers of friends...
Today, the rain falls on a soft easterly wind. Spheres of water run down each beautiful, burnt, heart-shaped fire. New leaf-growth buds green and glistening as I look up into the raining sky... and I too will bear my frosts no malice.
oh, i just love the magnolia tree's fat creamy hearts before they burst open. they always tempt me to want to pluck them and eat.
ReplyDeleteso far i have resisted ;)
you always exude such light and wisdom, mister g.
*
found this.
hope you like it...
"Catch a Body"
by Ilse Bendorf
Salinger, I’m sorry, but “Don’t ever tell
anybody anything” is a string of words
I would like to wrap up in canvas and sink
to the bottom of the Hudson, or extract
by laser from the ribcage of all of us
who ever believed it, who felt afraid
to miss someone, to be the last one
standing. “Tell everyone everything” is
not exactly right, but I do believe that if
your mother looks radiant in violet
you should tell her, or when a juvenile
sparrow thrashes its wings in dustpiles
and reminds you of a lover’s eyelashes,
you should say so. We are islands all of us,
but we are also boats, our secrets flares,
pyrotechnic devices by which we signal
there’s someone in here we’re still alive!
So maybe it’s, “don’t be afraid.” We can
rewrite Icarus, flame-resistant feathers,
wax that won’t melt, I mean it, I’ll draw up
a prototype right now, that burning ball
of orange won’t stop us, it’ll be everything
we dream the morning after, even if we fall
into the sea—we are boats, remember?
We are pirates. We move in nautical miles.
Each other’s anchors, each other’s buoys,
the rocket’s red, already the world entire."
I LOVE it!
ReplyDelete"but we are also boats, our secrets flares, pyrotechnic devices by which we signal there’s someone in here we’re still alive!" - PERFECT
'We are pirates'!! One day, you WILL get to touch that sun