Bamboo You

My bold, ballet bamboo

Sways in blackened skies,

With her airy shoots that climb

Towards the eye

of a darkening storm.

Her Icarus arms of reaching green,

Bruise in screeching winds,

Forming an army of waxen spires

Waltzing with a reluctance to be swept.

For beneath the darkened earth,

Unseen, and kept from sight

Lie her labyrinthine roots of steel

With their subtle might, immovable.

Ever-spreading, ever-heavy

These snakes of strong solidity

anchor gentle stems of glass,

and hanker for hold of soil

Like hungry, gasping lovers

grasping eachother’s arms.

Such is the bamboo paradox:

Delicacy bolted by relentlessness

In the subtle art of rootedness,

Often mistaken for fragility.

How marvellously unique

To bend without breaking,

To reach one’s fingertips to heaven

With one’s feet rooted

firmly in the ground.

Such is the art of persistence,

Such is the double-stairway

to success.