Poetry
Living In / Hasti
For South East London
Image by fpdd! via https://flic.kr/p/2mBEsTw
One street over
from the park to the secret orchard, the anarchist
beds on rooftops, crates and boxes, the
private allotment where grapes and figs hang out
for the eating in the fat, hot summer, the plot
where rocket grows like a weed, like an essential and vital member
of a community, scorched flowers
like yellow stars, their bite an inheritance
from all that smoke in the ground.
I have been reaching
out with my own slow roots, learning in timed topography
how they weave, how a sunflower drinks the lead.
Paradise comes
from an Avestan word, pairidaēza, means a walled garden, means
cultivated. The bricks are part of it. The Farsi word, پردیس , is like فردوس, like
the name for a gardener of language.
We are living between paradises, called
by the verdant scouts who open their arms to us
in vacant lots, climb up through cement gaps and line
roadsides like the wiry ungendered bridesmaids of spring. Here
the gardens grow out their limits, with forests like waves that burst over
concrete to meet like a flood plain,
vines twirling in slow motion splashes, spiny aloes puddling
stark against the rubble, the seeds
prised like rain, like a tower for the pigeons to sleep in.