LIFE Poem: Hannibal Barca’s Hortus Conclusus, by Braden Booth

We must cultivate our garden” – Voltaire

I’m sorry
I can’t nurse your wounds
my morphine poison dart frog saliva
was wasted on papercuts
and you come to me missing a ventricle and
I-
can offer you nothing
I leave you fallow
because I must tend my
pain
and so I tend my own self
[in rock soil]
like a serpent mound
C u r l e d around my aorta
while you lie [next to the river]
and flood with emotion and why
I-
can’t tend to you
is a mystery to me
it’s a mystery to you too
but I lay here and pick rocks from [clay]
and pick rocks from [my flagellated back]
and roll neosporin on [my elbows]
and resuscitate my halting rhythm
I plow deeper among salted earth
and I am

CARTHAGE
and I am the wind driving off
the [plains of Zama]
reeling from the Third Polemic War
pilum driven deep in solar plexus
under Saharan solar flare
because as much as I wish this weren’t true
I know that it is
that it is true
that it’s true that
I-
am not cultivating my own garden
but tending a briarpatch
pruning Russian thistle
and deadheading multifloral rose.
I-
am not growing a garden
I’m digging graves two feet apart eighteen feet long and four inches in the ground
to bury my heart at [Lake Trasimene]
when I could be gardening
but I won’t allow myself near enough [the plot]
The plot
of an unwritten novela
Anyone attempting to find
A plot
in it will be shot

so bury me

Author: poetryfest

Submit your Poetry to the Festival. Three Options: 1) To post. 2) To have performed by an actor 3) To be made into a film. View all posts by poetryfest