A Political Poem about Flowers and Trees

I feel solidarity with
city palm trees trapped in a
square dearth of earth
their roots restricted by concrete
their burst of green palms reaching to god
mourns the memory of their tropical homeland
forced immigrants to a land of
sun rays filtered through a chocolate smog haze
they learn to breathe the filth
of industrial waste
absorb the moisture and nitrogen of urine


I look to
the lonely cala-lilies
struggle to hold their ivory heads up
crisanthemums crawl through the colonies
of greenhouses
azaleas bloom in their apartheid
nursery pots
roots restricted
slave plants who can’t exist without
the mercy of their gardening masters


The grass lives in ghettos
Never allowed to grow beyond the limits
Of their Government housing projects
Of carefully constructed lawns
allowing grass to lives
only if it knows it’s place.
Blades feed on the miracle grow of acid rain
Like innercity children nourished on
A diet of Dorritos and coca-cola


Hedges beaten into submission
to grow in the master’s plan
green leaves become elephants and rhinos
in a Disneyland landscape


our forests live in refugee camps
quartered off in reserves
preserved for weekend recreation
their cousins massacred
in great rain forest genocides
to provide wood-themed homes.
timeless trees torn assunder for lumber


I fly over California
and spy the patches of green
sectioned off in gemeotric patches like concentration camps for crops
cotton bushes and strawberry fields
doused in corporate chemical baths


potted plants all look so defeated
flower blossoms look so beaten


but sometimes
sometimes
i look down and
see the ground givng way
concrete ripped apart
by the quiet
rebellion of the
growth of a tree’s roots
I see the civil disobediance
of bamboo
bursting through the thickest
marble prisons


and I gaze at the garden
towards the red roses
and learn to model myself
after its thorns
defying you
to steal
my bloom.


Beto Palomar