Author's Note: It was a response to The Bean Trees. It wasn't an essay so I thought it deserved to be on the main blog, instead of with the other essay responses. The little girl, Turtle, seemed like such a basic idea, that anyone can relate to. If you look at anything at different ways, you can get a lot of it from it, was one of the main ideas I wanted to say.
My first word was bean,
Maybe to mean
I am a seed,
And I need your help to grow
I need your light, your soil, your warmth.
I am like a shadow in the desert
Nothing to hide me,
Nothing to protect me,
There’s life unfolding all around me
Everything is amber and dry,
Filled with hate
Still the cactuses grow
Covered in thorns
A hint of green,
In the sea of brown
You cant expect something
pretty, to grow here,
From a cracked base like this.
But sometimes
Sometimes…
A flower will find the will
To grow on top of the thorns
To grow on top of the hate
To cover it up
To try to pretend the whole plant is beautiful
Sometimes…
A flower will find the will
To keep living, even though
It only opens just once
To flourish for its moment then
It leaves us again
I realized that I had come to my own terms with the desert, but, my soul was thirsty.
My full name is April Turtle Greer
April to mean
In spring,
In hope,
As a seed, my time to blossom into a tree
Turtle to mean
I am my own animal,
I can hide.
If I go into my shell,
Ill have to come back out eventually
Greer to mean
I am officially someone,
I belong to something,
I finally matter again.
My second word was Humbean
Maybe to mean
I am not yet,
The something I want to be.
I am part hum and part bean, and together it makes me
Maybe everything is more coherent
Maybe I can be more than one thing
Maybe Ma is my new soil, my new light, my new warmth.
