Ashok Jahagirdar Poet Free verse

Notes About The Poem

Ode to the Vessel Cracker
© Ashok Jahagirdar

 

Ode to the Vessel Cracker

The growth was not in the ring,
but in the rot.

It began with a refusal: the pot, a tyranny of ceramic.
The roots, pale serpents, began to press.
A fine, hairline crack, a fracture in the logic of containment.

This was the first transgression.

Then, the soil itself grew tired of being soil.
It dreamed of being air, of being skin.
It fell away in a slow, granular sigh,
exposing the pale, pulsing truth of the anchor.

The growth was not a reaching, but an un-becoming.

Leaves inverted, photosynthesis in reverse.
They drank the shadow, excreted a thin, bitter light.
The stem, a gnarled question mark, twisted back upon itself,
learning the syntax of its own distortion.

It did not seek the sun. It became a sun,
a small, cold, black-dwarf star of a thing,
pulling the light into its own peculiar gravity.

The growth was in the rupture.

A petal, sharp as a scalpel, sliced the humid air.
The scent was not of perfume, but of ozone and rust,
the smell of a new law being written.

It outgrew the category of "flower,"
outgrew the word "bloom."
It was a system of tensions, a beautiful error replicating.

The gardener, with his water and his stakes, wept.
He called it a malignancy, a failure to thrive.

But the plant was thriving in a language he could not hear—
the loud, silent frequency of a thing that has broken its vessel
and found itself larger, stranger, and more complete
in the open air of its own making.

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