song for the gardener

an inheritance of dirt tending

March is the harshest month, forcing
bougainvilleas through thin cracks.
Winter coddled us — dead and wrapped
and summer stalled the earth in her axis;
longing a shower — like Ganga — oozing sweat.
Pink, white and yellow slither down picket fences
as the sun, reluctant, commits to arson.
Days old slumbers now broken into blaring birdsongs,
those dreams drowned in infant grassbeds (fenced only by blue).

When my mother and I walked to the clinic,
she said: "Beta, don't be afraid." I flinched
on seeing the looming hunched trees inviting me
to hang (and fallen leaves scorched) in shades of orange.
With a doctor's words for a bargain gone sour,
and my mother's arm for a lack of crutch;
I shuffled back home on pain and footsteps,
unthinkingly swimming through regret and time.
She stopped for thieving a withering succulent,
to nurse life back in another dying child.

Our balcony is littered with life in transit
to manure. Quenched soil wafts rain scent while
the sun bleeds to black in my coffee; these habits
I inherit with the gardener's eyes. Parched or
drowned, all look the same (at the hands of ebbing clocks).
Dirt in nails wanes with promise, and weeds grow
faster than bark. Caring was all the gardener ever taught,
the rest I learnt from being her eldest.
I left my home for profits — trading all nostalgia for dread;
my mother raised a gardener, and all her plants are now dead.

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