A Half Rose Moon

I sit on the grass in the Flatbush Malls in Brooklyn, here in the traffic divider. Before me is the head of the intersection that is a semicircle of rosehips laced with bees. Completing the circle is a near invisible lip digging into the rest of the grass. The shape makes me think this may have once been a round garden. The lip bifurcates my crossed legs and slightly lowers my feet.

Here is a lesson about scars. But learning is a process of slowing down with directed soft eyes. And even though I want to learn about this invisible garden I am severely distracted.

You see, cicadas keep falling out of trees. My new bras are on a truck somewhere and I can’t wait to try the coral one. Social media keeps producing without me, without me, I am waiting on two, three emails. And even if I were to begin writing about this invisible garden my conclusion would be the same: something along the lines of the potential of germination in a grim world. I feel I repeat myself.

There is a little girl with her parents and her friend behind a shrub on the other side of me. She begins screaming over the shred of cicadas, “I don’t want to go!” over and over. Some things are woefully out of our control. But maybe in her call she will be able to access a small place in her mother, the control center of her time, that will also want to stay. If she just speaks, screams in the right way to unlock it.

Because language is an exquisite vessel for silences, silences pressing against winds of time.

Which brings me back to the bristling glass on this disappearing half moon garden. Who called for the tearing of the circle? Who called for the re-gardening? Whose hands ripped the plants? Whose hands sowed the new seed?

What was this place before the Flatbush Malls? before the myth of this man made moon? what was the story of this place before the city planning storytellers conducting this manipulated waxing and waning?

It is important to write this. Because I sense there is a part of my soul that wants to stay right where I am. There’s a part of my soul that is a shadowed garden.

But beneath even my own half moon is an expanse. Because if I know one thing about the moon it’s that it changes. Yet, beyond this knowing there is a membrane into an expanse of what I can only feel, like specks, stars in the distance.

What matters is these distant lights exist, what matters is that the moon, like the mother will change. And that reminder is enough to keep me speaking, screaming sometimes into the void in chorus with the cicadas with a life that is urgent and deeper than I can fathom.