Are My Plants Weeping?
Facebook comments turned poetry
Facebook user wrote: my mother died and my plants know. Nothing else
has changed. Some of her plants are weeping.
Are they grieving?
To survive, leaves shed moisture
containing excess minerals that would harm
the plant if they remained. This is necessary
and normal, state the experts.
Someone replies: we took care of a plant for a family, whose son
was having chemo and unable to be near
potential contamination. Years passed.
The boy passed away and within a week the plant died.
No changes to the environment, care, nothing.
Molecules grieve absence, a nurse writes.
Maybe she spends too much time
with the dying, she admits.
A granddaughter remembers the grandfather clock
made by her grandfather’s own hands. The hands
of the clock stopped the minute and hour of his death.
Her mother gave her a clock too. It did the same.
The spring after someone’s friend
died, their friend’s rose bush flowered
enough to make up for its fourteen years
of flowerless springs.
A niece writes about the spacious land her uncle tended,
always beautiful and green, with a forest bordering
the property that flourished. When he left
the earth, it was never the same: dim, browned, grieving.
It's been like this for a decade now.
Did you tell the plants your mum loved them?
All living things grieve. Even the rocks cry out
and the earth groans, says another and I believe
it because I hear it.
Another granddaughter remembers the plum trees
fruitless, when her grandfather died.
Her uncle gave them a stern piece of his mind
and they started growing fruit again.
We are the only animals born unequipped
to deal with life on our own, states one scientist.
We never escape helplessness.
Crying signals that we are unable to cope
Alone.
I’m sorry for your loss she has a beautiful garden
is written with no full-stop punctuating the clauses.
Where is this beautiful garden that belongs to loss?
Inside a tear drop?
All my Alocasia weep after watering.
I lie in a hospital room without sunlight,
wondering why the nurses can’t turn off
the glaring overhead and leave me in darkness,
curled.
I would hate for you to fall apart
if one your plants begins to fail, so
start again with a cutting. Then propagate. Wait.
Someone plays music on the radio
for their plants. My plants grew taller,
faster when they listened to rock music.
I learn that plants hear the dawn long
before they feel its light.
I hear tender whispers on the wards
and for the first time ever consider the comments
page uncurtained and pure.
I arrive home in midnight silence. I walk
across the kitchen to our peace lily, checking, checking,
checking that her three white eyes,
are three little lives,
still looking back at me.
Oooff my heart ached reading this 💗
Loved this so much.