First Person Account of a Seed

by Vinita Agrawal

All night, the face of awning green

hovers above me, its branches carved partly

with the grimace of my own imagination.

The sacred wounds of trees

leaves me trembling in my own hands.

This is the first lesson, though it comes

from no sage, no guide, but myself:

that if I must shatter, let it be outward,

like a burst of light, leaves, flowers, fruits—

not this inward scoping and scraping of darkness.

In the afternoon, a Laburnum, golden

and thick as a second sun, spills over my

shoulders while I am bent over in contemplation,

oblivious to the miracle of the universe

arriving blindingly through the window.

The yellow blooms are the second lesson,

both an elegy and an anthem, my true trophy.

I must remember them—

for memory is the only permanence

on the tarmac of sprouting.

Germinating is not a cage, I don’t squirm

or shrink to break open my coat, nor my vest

of testa and tegmen. To pullulate,

is to swim through an ocean of moist soil,

air, sunlight. Then, thrust out a radicle.

The annunciation of flowers, until colours

jostle with colours, is speech, if only

it could be understood. I dream of a thousand

forests in my frantic hunger to wrestle with

as many shadows as there are beams of light.

To exist without a map, is the third lesson—

to speak and not be heard, to have my ribs

ache with greed for verdancy, to lose friends

to the whirl of winds, to vanish for no reason,

to stay unbroken, even in the breaking.