The Garden A Storm Sees in a Desert

(Originally published in Here Comes Everyone journal)

Every desert is a garden
but it takes a storm
to hew possibles from
the stony impossible.
In footsteps of departed rain,
awake long-slumbering seeds
insistent on fulfilling
their paused destinies.
We call it hope:
they call it life.

Look: these lilac flowers,
erupting from tight-fisted rocks,
sunshine smashing cloud walls
to bestow hope upon the hopeless.
Look: this tiny orange-white butterfly
fighting a hurricane of a breeze
to nestle inside mauve-rivered petals,
for it knows not when
it will swim in them again.

Beneath a bare blue sky,
I wade through a ghost wadi,
hearing the phantom water
whispering through shrub pools.
The half-moon meanwhile reposes
in stanzas between the acacia branches,
lovingly gazing at the miniature gardens
hanging from them.

I think sometimes
if only I could send you
that specific glare
of that desert green.
Sundrops falling on snow
could not be more fierce.
I have to shield my eyes
but the glare is still there
at the end of the day,
an unbottled sea
pounding the shore until
land and water become one.

The Trees of Cubbon Park

Originally published in Poetics: Volume 1

These trees have heard aplenty over the years,
many a ripe secrets having found a home
inside those embracing branches.
So many have sought and found refuge also,
unburdening themselves at their braided feet:
secret lovers, almost-mothers, a dying dog,
finding a world to call their own
when there seemed none.
Someone was even born below a tree once:
she calls it her hospital.

The trees do not hold onto these secrets:
they disperse with the wind,

vanish inside a fallen flower

or become a fruit.
We are then eating other
people’s secrets:
we are our own secrets.