We till the soil and plant the seed,
and our rough hands press life
into furrows of belonging,
for this nation is not a flag unfurled
but a plot of living earth
where dignity roots deeper than decree,
where respect is the water we carry daily
in vessels cracked but holding,
still holding, enough to feed life.

And care is not sentiment but the calloused labour
of kneeling and working among difference,
among the roses, trees, bushes and the stubborn native grasses,
the creepers that cling to what others would discard.

Each plant is a voice in the chorus of soil,
and we, imperfect gardeners, tend not some remote ideal
but the textured ground beneath our feet,
with an ache in our backs that says this matters,
this bedding down of worth into the particular,
the daily, the lived, the growing that shoots to the sky.

For a garden neglected does not simply fade:
it becomes a wild field of forgetting,
a tangled mess of indifference
that chokes what once was promising
and various and ours.

So we build not with monuments but with mulch,
with the slow composting of who we are into
who we might become,
contributing in each ordinary hour
to the garden that asks everything of us and gives back
the only thing worth having:
a place where living and flourishing are tended.

 

14/3/2026