Stanzas: Monthly Chapbooks June 2015 (Concrete Nature) | Page 2

Stone Flowers

T

hey say the city is grey, overhead and underfoot. They say it’s a home for the
broken and the damned. They say there’s no life in those streets, that nature’s
overtaken on dual-carriage intersections.
Open your eyes.
We don’t have roaming beasts or squarely planted fields, you can’t smell the hawthorn
from the fencedoff fences, and maybe the bloom of life on a Saturday night is too
strange to accept, but don’t tell us there isn’t beauty here.
What you call a den of hedonism, we call a hub of life. A place to congregate,
to meet your fellow (wo)man and plant ideas not seeds; here the wild flowers grow
through cracks atop lead rooves.
Life finds a way.
So the sound of sirens and the smell of petrol takes some getting used to, sure. But if
you have any heart you’ll not dismiss the grey, for when you peel back the layers you’ll
find the core: humanity, at its best, struggling to strive and striving to survive.
This is our city, our home.
This is the home of
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