Magnolia

It’s their world, and we’re just living in it

There’s a house a few streets from mine that has an incredible magnolia tree at the front. It’s not the biggest tree, but it sort of encroaches on the pavement, claiming you as you walk past it. This tree is as beautiful as it is exotic to me. In my country of origin, spring is essentially two months of dusty wasteland as the slowly warming earth guards new growth and the winter grit remnants rub your eyes and cheeks raw. Then, in just one week, everything suddenly turns green and luscious, and then - it’s summer. I didn’t grow up with this temperate climate of an extended, flowering spring doing victory laps from March to May.

A few weeks ago I walked past the tree one Saturday afternoon and it was like getting the feeling back in your toes after coming in from the cold. I was choked with the sense that despite the Groundhog Day of inescapable political angst and lost certainties (or worse, if I allow my mind to go there), here we are again with the magnolia doing its thing, unabashed. And it will be doing its thing next year, and the year after, and eventually it will wither away and maybe another tree will take its place and continue the same cycle of dormancy and regrowth, regardless of the trials and tribulations of the human existence.

It’s their world, and we’re just living in it.

Perhaps in the Western democracies we got too used to thinking that the good enough times would last forever, with the living memory of collective big T traumas and what survival and courage mean fading away.

But perhaps, just perhaps, we’re forgetting that the bad times end, too. Life will find a way.

Have hope.

Magnolia

I first saw the bloom in Lockdown

fresh compliant eyes, our one hour’s privilege

naïve to a future that held no respite

after the TV doomcount of everyday grief

we’d just get a Different Bad

husked by my own fortitude

I reset each daybreak

balking at the petrol pump

my amygdala a nuclear atrophy

the void that stalks my children

but these birds of paradise claim the atmosphere

front lawn space crafts, their oblivious life force

stubborn beacons in April shiver

I cradle their waxy petals

transient, without end