When jasmine sprawls over the fence, seductive
as a languid woman, I am pleased.
And when narcissi send up slender stalks,
but no luscious flowers, I’m disappointed.
But if one fails, the other thrives. Nature
is like that. It doesn’t care. This seed
lands in fertile soil, the sun, the rain is right.
It grows to a sapling, then madrone,
limbs bronzed as children by the sea all summer.
That another lands on rock or is washed away
or sprouts and is trampled, doesn’t matter.
Nature wants life, but any life will do.
I stay outside till dark, hashing up the ground.
Inside is my daughter. She has split
the hard shell of her seed
and a lone naked root is searching the soil.
I don’t even know what she needs.
Anything I offer—or withhold—
may be wrong. And she can’t tell me.
She is mute as a plant. And so individual,
like the bean I grew in a jar in third grade,
my own bean, the tiny white hairs of its root
delicate as the fuzz on a newborn’s crown.
Just a singular seed and the treacherous odds.