Silent subversives

 Silent subversives 

Here’s half a dozen sunflowers 

tall in a fallow field 

have made me smile and raise a cheer. 

Hurrah for the gatecrashers, random, rogue

and accidental cosmos, shocking pink  

colonising onion rows. 

Whilst you might sow and coddle and tend

watchful for enemies out to destroy

for wind and drought and heat and cold 

and often as not your crop won’t grow

beans fail to run, flowers not show

see there on the wall all barren and dry

a rampage of passion flowers has taken root

scrambled and climbed and curtained the wall 

concrete now green, leaf, flower and fruit

somehow sustained in a dusting of dirt

making me smile and raise a cheer- 

three cheers for the triumph the random success

for nature not bounded, out of hand 

silent subversives running wild. 

Hounoux, July 22nd 2021