Plant Poem; Elliott Bangs

Once my love was kudzu
Somebody dropped a seed
and ran;
It was a weird miracle
and then just a problem

My love has been the blackberry.
It seemed to you to grow up overnight,
but only because a year passed
between your glances. By then
it had swarmed the whole neglected yard -
It wrote scars on your arms to remind you that
it was all sweet enough
till you fell into it

My love was the dandelions
obsessively sowed by the wishing of kids
amounting only to some splotches
of Roundup;

It was the volunteer tree
of unknown species, that grew
way, way too tall, until one day
it exploded in the power lines,
the end.