Expat Weed
Sidewalk cracks and
rocky mountain slopes
rooftops roadsides
rotten stumps and rubbish piles
the little expat flower
grows, and thrives.
It didn’t want
to be a garden flower
so carefully arranged
by garden governments
where it would have
a standard job:
be pretty, be useful,
don’t talk to
funguses
or dandelions
drinking chlorinated water
eating measured
sheep manure.
And so, when still a seed
it ran away
to join the weed world circus.
It hitchhiked
on a random wind, a river
a sticky gecko foot,
to talk to other weeds
unlike itself
drinking river water
and eating handy street food.
Wordsworth’s daffodils
were all the same
fluttering, dancing, collectively
choreographed
powerful in their
vastness, their sameness.
But I don’t know
those daffodils
who run in herds
they are, to me,
after awhile,
a boring yellow blob,
pretty, but all the same,
like Hollywood starlets.
I like this little expat flower
that knows the wind,
and the river
a weed, in the
cultivated world,
but a beauty
in the chaos of reality.
