Just so you know, I’ve been watering your plants all winter. You remember, those plants that you plucked feverishly from Bunnings clearance trays, the seedlings we pilfered from torn plastic planters piled outside for Council pickup,
remember
before you crept inside your mind and made a nest with your demons.
I’ve been watering your ferns, your monsteras, your Tahitian bridal ivy, your ornamental orange tree that flowers but never bears fruit, and I’ve been watering as an act of ritual,
and what else is such a ritual but
an act of love and
perhaps an act of resistance?
through that confusing damp, wet, winter where the black mould crept along our concrete walls and the tomato plants flooded despite their adequate drainage,
I watered,
crooked stalks that looked like dandelions but weren’t and plants that were possibly invasive species
or simply just weeds.
Even while you swaddled yourself with weed and booze and spent your days scrolling through doom-scapes [and yes, they would call this enabling]
[the AA, the co-dependency experts]
I’ve been watering your plants
as ritual,
as rebellion,
but I thought you should know about those plants we rescued, the ones wrapped in black plastic with flat angular leaves, the ones we rescued on a hopeful night-
Those plants are blooming.
I think they’re irises.
If I stare at them long enough, they look like silken lilac and gold origami cranes,
gazing up at the lightening sky.
Word upon Word 