Lilliputian

I. Seeds     
     
Seven year old Lilli Putian sat in a long, blossom     
dress.     
She watched as the roots to her seeds progressed     
and watered them     
so lovingly     
knowing they would never     
reciprocate     
all      
she felt.     
Mother bought them at the local shop, in a small, paper packet    
Lilli thought would never grow a thing.    
She tapped her dirt-filled nails, against the ground, as half of them died     
and frowned.     
Though, as days passed, water and sunshine made them grow     
in the back garden between the pond and the garden gate.     
The beauty Lilli saw in salmon buds     
stationed straightly in lines, in rows     
she waited for the blooming rose.
Flowers. 
     
II. Flowers     
     
Days had passed, in the garden at the back of a house in Hampstead Heath.    
It's summer and Lilli is eight.       
Thorns have started to grow on the roses  
from the paper packet her mother bought  
at the local shop.     
Garden girl of eight, though she thinks she does, doesn't know all,     
she catches her weak fingertips on the strange new buds of a rose.     
While daddy chugs a bud and watches her play.     
It's sad, she cries, big, blue tears rolling from her big, blue eyes.     
Similar days have come and gone as     
she spoke to the flowers and each of their buds,    
which she learnt were thorns...    
by the way.   
Lilli had this new, alive part of her     
invested in those thorns,  
a space that would not be complete     
until they're one.     
     
III. Weeding      
     
Now she was weeding away...      
Now she was weeding away...     
Thorny days of summer melting away...     
A bottle of old, empty bud by the over-flowing plant pot that became an ashtray was only a reminder 
of father's voice no longer echoing through the house and out the kitchen window, though she honestly missed all the screaming.       
      
Lilli pulled roots from roots     
and weeds from weeds,     
Mother's head.  
Weeds from roots     
and roots from weeds,     
Father's head.  
Empty tears, you know, those tears that make your breathing unsteady and feel like you're going to gag yet you can't actually get a single tear to fall.     
Lilli carried on until it was dusk.     
Mother pulled her garden girl inside, like some withered root or weed     
in her long, blossom dress covered in dirt.  
And in the shadows, of the ten pm night, blowing wide, in the blustering wind,     
was the garden gate.     
Mother Nature had slipped into the night.