They’re growing like weeds
Learning to crawl up rusted chains
Sharp and soft, they sparkle in the sun
Transforming into new earth
The church bells ring for them
2 responses to “Sitting with a Broken Place”
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I have always been fascinated by this school yard near my house. It’s behind a church and school that has been abandoned and there’s something so beautiful and sad about that old rusty playground. I walk by almost every day, but I’ve never sat and stared at it. I brought coffee, obviously. People wondered what I was doing sitting there. A woman gave me a recommendation for a park I could write in a few blocks away. The longer I sat, the more amazed I was that this built itself. Did someone cart in some dirt and seeds into this lot? How can there be enough soil in the ground for these to grow? But I’m pretty sure that this happened over many years of growth between cracks, and decay from that growth, and growth from that decay, exponentially each year. It’s just amazing that this place that we see as ‘broken’ turned itself into something incredible.
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Your reflection reminds me so much of that Jane Hirshfield poem OPTIMISM enacted:
More and more I have come to admire resilience.
Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foam
returns over and over to the same shape, but the sinuous
tenacity of a tree: finding the light newly blocked on one side,
it turns in another. A blind intelligence, true.
But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers,
mitochondria, figs—all this resinous, unretractable earth.
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