The Quick And The Fast: Week 5

Puns abound and food is scarce; that sums it up.

From http://peace-weaving.blogspot.com/ the poem for week 5: I read a poem about Guantanamo yesterday. I did not take a fancy to it, so I wrote my own:  
Father Ghraib and Mother Gitmo

Behind the garage there is a garden,
in the wastelands. The builders
stole the soil; they sold it
to pay the landscapers crew!

Water channels dug into sand and stone,
through broken concrete and asphalt,
recycled crap from everywhere.
Experiment to see what will grow…

builders just throw trees into holes,
toss flowers into trenches…
no mindfulness, no husbandry
no botany, no lasting beauty…

trees…symbols on an architect’s sketch:
seen from above
pointillistic circles with bent branches
twisting around a circle
like swastikas deformed.

But something grows in this waste land!
A tree surrogate with leaves like elephant ears
of a wide florescent green on a stem
thinly veined in burgundy kermes;

a desert spike with compounded eyes
of saffron lids bepetalled;
walking sticks with purple crowns,
mille foil clouds, creeping parasols,
great pendant hearts, explosions of the briar,

Hemlocks where we hang our hearts;
covert agents of desire,
spies of reproduction,
texting with chromo-semaphores.

The fairies pippin, Mab’s nonpareil,
spanish pearmain, grizzly muscadine,
early Margaret and scarlet crofton;
all fruits of rich imagination!

In the midst of this, on the verge
of a small isle in the streams,
stands a vulgar hyssop unseen
among the vibrant pageantry.

United around its upper course
juvenile aphids clutch and huddle
in prison suits of blood-orange:
silently there and nowhere else…
and wait for the time of their fulfillment.

A denumerable crowd sits as if
in dreaming prayer, bidden to the masjid
of stinging nettle and menthol,
alone and stripped of their imam
whose sermon they cannot ken.

I watch in fatal fascination
this epithalamion symbiotic,
not knowing if we rise
as ladybirds to dry our wings…
or swarm to our demise.