We have
five stands of
as-big-around-as-my-thighs
bamboo on our land.
Bamboo that
towers above all but
the tallest of the live oak trees,
bamboo that waves and bends and sings
and sheds
hundreds upon hundreds
of long, golden-brown
needle-file shaped leaves.
Only, bigger.
And everywhere.
And they get into everything.
And I love them.
I pile them up
and use them as mulch
around my roses;
roses that otherwise wouldn’t survive
in the mostly-sand that
we have for earth.
I rake them up
with my son
and we dump them into the compost pile,
while my husband mows them to bits
and they get walked and rained on
into a compact mat under
our sparse grey-brown-green
southern grass.
And there they sit,
splinters of golden-brown
bamboo leaves
decaying, and covering the ground
with a thick mat
that seems to obscure
everything.
Until you look a bit closer and
then you see
how those leaves
in their death and decay
in their unwanted by the
tall, graceful bamboo stands state
are becoming
one thin layer at a time
the kind of
deep, dark earth
that little plants
and big elephant ears
take root in
and grow,
that rose roots are protected by,
that compost piles eat up
like some kind of delicious
cast off gift of golden-brown,
a gift that
that takes a white-grey sand earth
and turns it into
greens and purples and
rose and vegetable gardens.
These cast off leaves,
otherwise a nuisance,
are something wonderful
to me.