The Toxic Garden

What do we call a garden that grows dead plants in the wilting sun?

Clouds that cry poisoned rain, allowing dangerous plants to grow

The brown earth, cracked, like split lips opening with

Nothing to say

Except the barest whisper of life

Growing

Only to be choked in the noxious fog blanketing the garden

The garden that has weeds desperately clinging to the high stone walls

Flowers raising their sunken heads in their last act of

Almost deadened defiance

Worn grass, parched, except for the acid rain that falls

The garden, next door to some colossal monster of a building spewing black

Smoke

Poor forsythias, now bilious yellow spikes protruding from a bony stem

The lilies, the chrysanthemums, the dandelions, and the daffodils

Are slowly, painfully, dying

And the sky is the color of an ashen carcass

A wasted garden of life discarded

In favor of the wealth that the industrial monster smirks of:

Smoke and waste and disturbance

Until the voices of the garden can only croak

Toxic

Toxic

Toxic