Enthroned in his earthenware pot

 

Watercolour on Bockingford 300gsm – 8″ × 12″
Dried Hydrangeas from my garden (Tarlton, South Africa) standing in my potting shed.

 

From the bottom of the garden,

enthroned in his earthenware pot,
the hydrangea god surveys his minions—
lavender agapanthuses bowing starburst heads,
red begonia calyxes trumpeting his fame,
oleander leaves whispering of his misdeeds.
The central path leads straight to him. Behind,
a stained mirror and mossy wall back up his power.
Thousands of crinkled, tiny, white ideas occur to him
with frilled and overlapping edges. No one else
deploys such Byzantine metaphysics. No one
can read his mind. Only he remembers
the children’s secret fort by the cypress tree
among fraught weeds, rusted buckets, and dumped ash,
and how lost the grown-ups sounded, calling, as night came.
“Hydrangea” By Rosanna Warren

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