This year there are four wild orchids
on the upper level of the garden,
tiny, speckled, pink,
they look like angels with wings
Last year, when we
moved here,
there was only one,
growing near a just-planted orange tree
surrounded by a carpet
of pink convolvulus flowers
no one planted, like the orchids,
like the winter anemones,
on whose dried petals they now grow
in perfect season-sequence
The people who lived
here before us
said there were no wild flowers at all,
and I wonder if they looked,
wonder if the gardener possibly poisoned them,
for the sake of a uniform lawn,
perhaps unaware of the presence
of these fabulous seeds
beneath his weed-killer chemicals
This year, it’s all
so perfect,
the roses, red and white,
the orchids, the orange blossoms,
the other flowers,
you’d think we live
in the Garden of Eden
But in truth,
we are here on the border,
weeds to our neighbours
in their otherwise perfect universe,
who now and again
call for our destruction,
from the villages we see
while standing, admiring,
the orchids in our garden
on a warm April afternoon
