Latest Poetry from Adolfo Caso... Hosta

Image by Gregs Landscaping via Flickr
















HOSTA


by Adolph Caso


One would have us believe
the boulders
scattered in my backyard
were brought there
from faraway Colorado
on conveyor belts of the ice age
or
through subterranean tunnels
dug out of volcanic lava,
hardened
into the outcrop in my yard.

No,
the boulders
in my backyard
are there
from the beginning of time
when the earth formed--
and I do not know who created them
or,
painfully,
why they are there.
I look into each structure
and see Michelangelo’s torsos
emerge from their amorphous marble
awaiting the guided hand
to give form to pre-existing life
in search of freedom,
as if
Michelangelo were
the true creator!

I stand
in silent wonderment
in front of primal creation:
You, my boulders
(preceding all else
and all else
issuing
from your rocky cores
long before the rains
reduced you to granules,
long before the winds
swept across the earth
to form the soil)--
you continue to stand silently
over your own reduced forms
safe-guarding
your granule-bearing life forms.

Miracle of miracles!

Photo by Adolfo

From within its deep crevice

breaking out to achieve its freedom

as in Michelangelo’s blocks of marble

a bunch of Hosta leaves

are propping up their single stem

laden with bell petals of purple

undulating across the boulder—

a living form

erupting

from stone

whose time

goes back to the beginning

when the earth was nothing--

rock formations seeking a single orbit.

Around the ridge of Mount Vesuvius

the broom flower

glows in its golden petals

a challenge to the mighty volcano,

its numbered eruptions

in contrast to the eternal gold of the broom
outlasting each and every eruption,
testimony that life has preceded
Vesuvius
and the boulders
scattered in my backyard whose
single,
     colorful
          tender,
and
vulnerable Hosta
grows from within
in defiance of time
within the broken boulder
through which
this purple flower
achieves its annual form
to reveal an existence going back
to when the earth was formed.