A Story in Seeds and Petals

You can’t never, no way, no how, hold her back. She won’t have it. She’s as tough as rope, wiry and wary, and she clings there on the abyss, sinking her roots into earth and stone alike, reaching her fingers into cold metal and sealing a grip. A grip like the iron she soaks up through her veins. She’s as fierce as sunset, she’s bright like the sun; she soaks the sunlight in, drenches and drowns in it, feeds on it, and then closes up as the darkness comes, huddles in on herself and waits for the day.

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She can hear the whispers, as they pass along the roots, and as they float in the wind. Petals carry stories, and she listens for those stories. She dreams about those stories, she dreams about a lost love, whose petals were as soft-white as hers, whose heart was the same sun-cooked yellow. Touches of pink against her farthest edges. The two of them, so beautiful together, so perfect in their unity, their yin-yang match, their inter-mingling of root and stem.

She listens to the seeds, the petals, the dried leaves, the loose fibres, as they flurry past, cataloguing their travels. Just one story. Just one sweet, soft story, one she can relate to, one that would sooth her crying heart.

She remembers the rainstorm, the gathering wind. Pelting water. In the garden, clinging, as the wind swept them up and carried them away.

She: to here.

The other: to ?

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She isn’t ordinary. She feels that in her roots; the way she drinks in cold iron, hot copper, the way she can take the sun and mould it inside herself. She can change. Others are not the same as her, others can’t change. They can’t fill their petals with red and grey ferrous colours, they don’t have this inner strength she builds inside herself.

They will never have wings.

Nor will she, not in the traditional sense. But when her seeds take the winds, her seeds are like sparks, they glow in the sky as they populate, explore. They sink into cracks, into alleyways, into tough brick walls. And where other seeds would find only death, they find life. It’s hard, grey life, but they chew on it, they dig deep – her glorious children – and they suck up this heavy food, armouring their petals, turning silver and copper, growing big, bright. They can do it.

And as they grow, they call out. They don’t even know it themselves, why they do it, but they call out an identity – since their kind have no such thing as names – they call out a message, and they bounce it off one-another, signal to signal to signal, always changing and growing, exploring, migrating.

And she hears their call, and the call of her grandchildren. Such a beautiful sound. And though she knows she may never find her lost love, she knows that the music of her children, and her children’s children, and theirs, will go on calling, go on searching, for as long as her progeny fill the world. And knowing: she sleeps easier.

Picture credit/discredit: author's own work