I am The Garden

I am a Goddess.

I am The Great Expanse. I am Life itself.

I live, and breathe, and speak in rhythm with the leaves.

From my skin sprouts grass that whispers my secrets to the insects, and covets the sun, and the rain, and the air. From my bones, roots burst forth — through clayed soil that clings to the tips of my eyelashes — and expose my marrow to the sky. My bones, old and tall, are ringed with age and wisdom unobtainable, yet unnecessary to obtain.

I am the skeleton of this world. In my ribcage, birds make their nests, raise their young. In my lungs, families are born, and raised, and die, and return to me through the soil to be loved, and live, once again in my heart.

I am the Earth.

I am the isolated land of the garden — I am the planet in its entirety.

I am the whole as much as the fragment; the puzzle as much as the individual pieces, interconnected to form the grand image. The continents are a part of my body as much as the individual blades of grass cut, and the flowers plucked, and the food ingested, and the ore upheaved from my pores, and the pearls formed in the mouths of clam shells.

I am the Hearth.

I am the Home, and the Heart, and the warmth of a lazy morning mixed with the melancholic blow of evening wind. I am the dark that lulls the weary and accomplished to sleep, and the day that lightly rouses and welcomes you in the morning.

I am Contradiction and Conclusion.

I am the Quiet and the Calm.

I am the soft breeze through long grass.

I am the glow of dandelions under a warm, yellowed sun.

I am the Rain and the Roads

I am the storm clouds and the cold air that rolls in from over pools of water.

I am the flowing momentum that spills over the lip from one bowl —

Into the next bowl —

Into the next bowl —

Then back to the top again, ready to flow once more.

I am Proud.

I am Proud — of my body.

From my body they live, and through my many children I survive. Humans make their homes in the curve of my waist and the folds of my skin. My many children, of many kinds, clamber and crawl over me; cooing, and gurgling, and chirping, and laughing in their own, many languages. I don’t speak the languages, but I do not need to. I understand them all the same.

I am Proud — of the weight which I can carry.

My mountainous, bold shoulders hold up the sky; my hair knots into wild overgrowth decorated with water-jewelled cobwebs to hide the shy and meek. My figure dips into the trenches and far hidden depths beneath the waves and allows me to uplift the terrestrials high into the sky where the sun can kiss them. Whether on their wings as they soar to greater heights, or as they lay down on stones and in grass fields along the swell of my belly, or bury themselves in my pores and nestle among my tendons.

I am the Determinant of the Land and the Waters; of Life and Succession.

I am Proud — of my children.

I hold their small, pudgy hands and point to the constellations that surround us in expanses of nothingness. I nurture them, grow them, inspire them to be more than they can imagine. Some leave me, fly from the nest into the vast coldness I shelter them, and their siblings, from. Into the blackness, into the very same stars we had once gazed upon together as the sun sets in the west, but they always return.

To their Mother                       To their Home                                  To their Nest

I am the Royal.

I am the Sovereign.

I am the Regnant; I am the Empress.

I am the Everlasting & Prevailing Force of Life.

I am will, and Nature, and the All-Encompassing Zeal.

I am Everything.

I can be Everything without reducing You,

my children,

to Nothing.

I am the Mother —

The birds fly on my gasps for breath. The fish swim in creeks of my blood. The whales moan in the puddles of my tears. The stoney patches of my eczema glisten with the long-trodden paths of snails; silver tattoos and silk roads drawn across the expanse of my skin like a map. My acne blooms weeds in which the butterflies feed, and the bees pollinate.

I am the Palimpsest.

I am a garden rewritten.

I am the Growth —

I am ever changing, but I am forever changed, dictated to kneel at the whim of plastic surgeons: landscapers, gardeners, developers. I am wild overgrowth strung up against sticks and metal grids to grow against the natural curve of my spine. Quills protrude from my skin and quiver in the wind, marred with aesthetic scoliosis inflicted to maintain your conceptualised beauty standards.

I am A Victim of Erasure —

As a whole, my inners have been unearthed. My bowels have ruptured; my bile and gases exhaled into the sky and leaking across my abdomen. My arms have been slit and, despite my wails, coils and pipes have been implanted, walls erected, and concrete laid in thick slabs. My skin butchered, and sown, and pulled, and sown again. My lips are plumped with asphalt; my native eyelashes have been plucked, now they are glued on in invasive shapes and colours. My cheeks are reddened with desertification and my hairy legs burned back into bare earth. I am infected with chemical sepsis — it raises my temperature and makes me delirious and weak.

I am No Longer What I Was —

My fragment self, as the garden, is weighed down under brick and concrete. Shackled by fences adorned prettily with foreign hedges and vines that tinge burgundy in Autumn. The perfume of jasmine is exotic, but the foreign fumes make me hack with asthma. I am watered with chemical — ‘filtered’ — water that dries my skin and builds up calcium around my parched lips.

I am Appalled.

I am Crying

Can’t you hear me?

Fractured

Sculpted

Remodelled

Ruined.

Chip, chip, chip

Away at me, until

There’s nothing more of me

Then, when you’re bored,

Chip, chip, chip

Away at me again

Chip, chip, chip away

At my hair until it’s tame

Chip, chip, chip away

At my skin, until it’s pretty

Chip, chip, chip away

Until my body is swollen with plastic and concrete filler, then

Chip, chip, chip away

At me, until I’m thin and bony,

And malnourished of all my natural beauty

Prune away

At my personality

Until the humanisation has occurred

And I no longer look like me

But you

Carve me down

Until I have been made in your image

The image of you

The image you have of me

The image of you

On me

The image of you,

On me,

As you

So wanted

Look at me

Look at what you’ve made me

I don’t feel myself anymore

So little of my original self remains

Tell me…

Am I Still Beautiful?