It was here first,
the bindweed.
Before you even
paved the drive
it had sent roots
down sixteen feet—
not a defense mechanism,
just survival.
It had put out
those delicate
pink flowers, too,
trumpeting each morning,
long before you,
blooming not to be beautiful,
but just because
blooming is what bindweed do.
So when you
wake one morning
and see how its leaves
have pushed up
green arrowheads
through the asphalt,
bumping up what is flat,
the asphalt now cracked,
you could choose
to curse it and
you could choose to say
what barriers
will I push through
today?
The idea that you pull out of the poem, that bindweed was here before, is classic weed theory, but taking on the bindweed persona at the end strikes me as the perfect way to end it. And I like the green arrowheads too!
I think also, the poems says something about being true to yourself, your nature. It’s the bindweed’s nature to grow upward. Too, there’s something said about deeply setting and spreading, your roots, of staying put, of persevering through the obstacles.
Too, it’s a tangible example of the Leonard Cohen couplet: There is a crack in everything./That is how the light gets in.