Flowers in Stone

When I lived in the city, years ago, I discovered a little tree that had sprouted through the pavement in a parking lot behind a dry cleaning business and was thus exposed daily to the noxious fumes that spewed from the rear of that edifice.

That parking lot also served a bar of ill repute that catered mostly to bikers, drug peddlers, and pimps; and so, additionally, that scrawny sapling inadvertently suffered the many tramplings of the meandering inebriates, the numerous wranglings of drunken fistfights, and the degradation of countless urinations and repeated vomiting.

Yet, every spring, that little tree would green anew and defiantly raise its bent and crippled branches to the sun and sky. I came to regard that nameless arboreal stripling with some degree of respect, and I often thought about the stories it could tell, if only it could speak.

When all the others dormant lay,

Already swelled with moisture in the earthen bed,

The wind came by and asked to play;

And whisked us off to leave us in another stead,

To roll and tumble by the way.

Through cracks of asphalt and cement we sowed the thread

In meager grains of sand and clay.

It isn’t lavish here like where the others spread,

And bees are wont to stay away

From wayward blossoms all alone. Though they’d be fed,

They’ll not be tempted to the stray.

And there’s another thing… of which we live in dread,

A fear we face from day to day.

It is the grating of rubber from a tire’s tread.

But we bring color to the gray,

If you would only look, before you forge ahead.

r. nuñez, 6/2011