Crown of Weeds

Once, to see gold scatter across a yard

was to measure wealth.

Roots dug deep like iron stakes,

leaves bitter enough to cure,

petals bright as coin spilled into the grass.

They were food, they were medicine,

they were survival at the edge of hunger.

Those who held them were rich,

not with ornaments,

but with endurance stitched into the soil.

Now the same crowns are slashed down.

Called nuisance, called weed,

their heads lopped off

before they can scatter their truth.

The ground pretends to forget them,

but forgetting is never clean.

The roots lie hidden,

waiting in the dark like memory,

and each season they push back,

defiant against the blade.

This is how worth is buried..

first praised, then discarded,

until the world pretends

it was never of use.

But erasure is brittle.

What holds beneath the surface

outlasts dismissal.

Every strike scatters further,

every cut multiplies what was meant to be ended.

The stalks rise with spite in their marrow,

seeds flung like sparks

into ground no one meant for them.

There is no softness in their return.

They are not fragile.

Their strength lies not in being wanted

but in refusing to vanish.

What is cursed as intrusion

is survival sharpened.

A thousand crowns in the grass,

a thousand suns thrown low to the dirt,

burning against the idea

that they can ever be erased.

Dandelions wear the history of many..

once a treasure to covet,

now laid in a muddy grave.

And yet they still scatter flicks of sunlight beneath the darkness,

a record of resistance etched in seeds,

bursts of sundrops lingering where no one looks.

Their raw truth stands on the outskirts, uninvited:

richness does not die

because it has been forced to be forgotten.

It waits.

It roots.

It claws its stance back into the earth,

growing once more

where erasure thought it had won.