Weed
Today, Friday is overcast. Clouds and wildfire smoke from Canada’s forests.
Nature seems real enough to me. There are wildflowers as well as “weeds” growing, living, drawing nourishment in a section of my backyard. Weeds and wildflowers are a distinction of language, my trace of a line between vegetation that I desire, and that which I imagine as “ugly.” And weeds occupy space, depriving wildflower plants, and pollinator bees.
Who am I and what is my desire? I am no immortal being to create value, by fiat fixing what belongs and what does not. A twinge of anxiety comes when I write to confess my mortality: I too, not unlike a wildflower and a weed are to be around for just a while.
Still here I am. Tomorrow I intend to participate in the “No Kings” demonstration here in Geneva.
The one occupying the White House to some – is a flower. But to me, and to others like me, a weed, is a weed, is a weed… Yes I know weeds simply are, one more expression of nature’s real…
This man is eager to host a military parade in Washington tomorrow, a parade fit for a king. There are to be tanks, missile launchers, and flyovers. It is his 79th birthday, and the 250th anniversary of the army, after all. The display of rank militarism, a chilling subtext message is broadcast, fulfills the definition of weed-like for me.
One way or another this weed merits removal – by the root.
2 thoughts on “Weed”
If my body had never
been soiled in a garden
of weeds I don’t think I
would’ve known to pluck
the rose when it finally
bloomed
Raquel Franco
A fine poem indeed! Flowers/Vegetables and weeds are co-dependent as the poet illustrates. When there is no recollection of the terror and the grind of tyranny, we Americans are less and less inclined to embrace the joint responsibility of administering a Republic. We no longer have a Republic, and what the future holds is anyone’s guess.
Love the poem…