Tuesday 18 April 2017

A Garden Such as This


The electronic hum of bees and wasps,
fixed atop narrow rods. They sometimes sway.
The cannot pollinate. Their stings are blunt.

The flowers’ metal hinges groan. Their brightness
has faded: dull pale pastel ghosts of colour;
some dead-headed with a pair of bolt-cutters.

The concrete lawn with perfect painted lines:
that shade of sickly institution green.
Grazes of pain for any child who plays there.

The hollow iron tree which doesn’t grow,
or change, or mirror seasons with its blossoms
and leaves. There it stands: stupid; a dead fiction.

The rusted mesh of wire which wove a bird’s nest:
empty of life; housing chrome-plated eggs.
A stuffed bird sings from speakers in her eyes.

The lifeless, cold and joyless work of fools;
a curiosity of sly pretence,
its every inch decisively unnatural.

2 comments:

  1. the dead farce of pretense. bogus counterfeit. as it stands in and of itself it can be ok i suppose (even quite good) but not if it is perversely viewed as what it never was, no matter how much it was supposed to be that other legitimate 'garden'. it's not that garden it's another kind of garden, altogether distinct. the problem for me is when people refuse to differentiate two alien parties, like putting a sofa up a tree and saying they are two trees, or else saying they are two sofas. something must be labelled what it actually is, not what someone else fantasises it to be

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. as well as fully distinguished from what it is not

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