Young Writers Camp - Oakland: Cactus Flowers

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Cactus Flowers

I belong to the rough rocks,
The old clothes too big for me.
amid the gilded books,
my father's poppy-field bindings.
I am held up by the chair arms
and the eyes of the storms that
rage down the hall, behind a closed door

The walkway to the Library
where blocks were played with again and ago,
My old ties to a rusting innocence.
My grandmother's slipping sense
passed down to my mother in a gray-pink stream;
shutting my eyes against something I don't want.
Warren and Tom, the old surfboard we found in the bushes
and Summer and I tried to ride

up the hill where the pebbles are always changing
the burned out tree that holds me:
everything I am.
A found mother's-day card
to a dead mother, someone else's dream of homegrown herbs
and little houses by the sea, so like mine.

Games of war on the little round table
and tea and toast while the rain beats the ivy,
nights without mothers and my mother without nights.
Holding up mountains and seeing there is only a pebble,
cutting the boundaries between light and dark
like a red ribbon.

Every year I grow and die with the roses,
I watch the cactus flower and I know
that it blooms only when the moon has risen in the sky.

by Chloe
Young Writers Camp, Oakland

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