Home and Garden

 

'Aparajita' or unvanquished. Blue pea.

 

I.

You plant something and you think – this is mine,

this bougainvillea, this blue pea vine,

this periwinkle and dwarf screw pine –

in time I’ll be calling them home.

 

Home’s a garden, a chair, a balcony,

a particular drape of a fig tree,

the end of the road and tranquility.

But bear in mind nothing’s your own.

 

The annuals bloom as per their schedules,

and the blue pea doesn’t follow your rules,

it puts out shaggy tendrils, minuscule

protests against the frame it’s grown.

 

You know the perennials – the neem and lime,

if they take root, they’ll be here a long time

and they’ll outlast you, even the blue pea vine

will grow back in springs when you’re gone.

 

Home is where my plants are – that’s what you think.

But know in the end, the red, blue and pink

will fade and regrow and you’ll leave with nothing –

there’s no garden you can call home.

This is the first part of a three part poem, 5X3, 15 stanzas in total, each with a 5,5,5,4 beat and an aaab slant rhyme scheme, with b being repeated throughout in monorhyme. I don't know why I am telling you this, because it shouldn't matter a jot to the reader anyway, however important it might feel to the writer. It's taken me two weeks to complete. Its symmetry feels like an accomplishment, it's pleasing. I'm hyperaware that it might feel boring to someone else. What do you think?

I'm still afflicted by the same old same old bee in my ancient bonnet - the prompt for this one floated up on my feed somewhere, it was one of those framed-text wall art and it read - 'Home Is Where My Plants Are' in a squiggly decorative font,  suspended over rather a lush container garden. 

Tbh, that statement in my case should read home is where my books are. Ennyhoo. My own container garden is anything but lush at the mo, incessant rains and the painters' safety tarps hung for months on end have taken their toll, but I'm happy to report the plants are now recovering. On reflection, I find that I've unconsciously put in the plants that I've seen around me growing up - hibiscus, the blue pea, periwinkle. Recreating in miniature on my balcony what was once planted in and around our home in Maiduguri many yonks ago. On further reflection, hibiscus  has been a part of my balcony/garden/home in every single country I've lived in as an adult as well. Neems and Flamboyants have been part of my microenvironment too in some unobtrusive way. Some flowers/trees just define home even when one thinks it is better defined by books or something else. 

The second and third part of the poem get into the ultimate garden, how unpossessable it is and how expulsion/exile is its defining feature. And then humans spend all their days longing for it and trying to get back in.  I guess for most of us with ordinary childhoods, that is our eden which we try to recreate and of course we fail - the past is past, there is no recreating it, there is no selective reliving it in any format whatsoever. There is only the present and the planting. And if successful, someone will enjoy the show down the line after one is gone. 

Hope you and your plantings are defining beauty, tranquility and whatever else you want them to. Have a brilliant week.