The Children of Oleander

In the morning he found me grasping at the earth for answers, losing hair like petals wasted to the ground. As he neared, pondering the use that I could be, he felt a slight breath upon the flesh of his cheek. It whispered coarse and wanton… regretful and crying to the sky for a dawn which could hold me, love me with its desert fingers. He crinkled the forehead between his eyes, and it seemed to me that those jewels danced in the shade between comprehension and decision. This new man, this premature gardener kneeled next to me, and with the sweetest glimpse he said, “Flower, Darling tears do not become you. Your face is that of pleasure and of peace. Please, tell this burnt man what pain could possess you so.” I looked to him for a moment, puzzled at his foreign words and thought of the days when I was strong and fair as my mother, when my sisters envied the sun and I.

I turned then, ashamed but unable to coax anything else out of my greenery, and showed him my wilting hair. He only nodded, sure of himself. And as he reached out with his hands blistered from my lover sun, I closed my eyes and became a chosen one; another to adorn and to keep, to guard between pages of a loved one’s words. He kissed me as he did it, thanking the sparse earth for its gift. So precise and halfway caring I almost believed that I was his only. Foolish. Cold memories await me now in this restless little notebook. I am pressed between stories of birds, of tiny shadows and of voices in the mountains. Between girls and men and the ways that they weave together their words into days and days and days. I am content, though. For now that I am here in my new way, another Oleander will bloom and start it all again, a child of the sun and of the rain.