Trump is a Terrible Gardener

Trump is a terrible gardener.

(I’m not sure whether this is a poem or a microfiction or an essay or a rant, but here you go: I am also working up a mini video of this, voiced and captioned with background music)

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“Trump is a Terrible Gardener“

The children gather round the gardener as she rests between her garden beds.

She takes a deep breath, eases herself to the ground between them, and begins:

Stay with me for a moment, says the storyteller, rubbing her rough, worn, gardening hands together to ease the ache.

The US - its economy, its infrastructure, its people, its National Parks and Monuments – is, or was- a huge, sprawling, relatively healthy garden.

Decay exists – existed – here and there as in every garden, but the garden feeds us and shelters us and gives us a place for picnics and love nests. Fed. Sheltered. Gave.

Enter Trump.

Or, enter Musk. Either way, this albatross will be, has been eventually laid at Trump’s feet, so:

Enter Trump.

Trump doesn’t garden. He sees no difference between a noxious weed and food for body or soul.

But gee, that weed-whacker makes such a cool noise.

Trump is a Terrible Gardener.

He feels powerful and alive with its roar in his ears and its vibration waking feeling in the rotted skin he hides under yellow paint.

He grins from ear to ear and starts chopping every plant he sees to the ground. Every. Plant.

He hands the weed-whacker to Musk, who revs the engine and waves the whacker wildly in the air. More death. More sap bleeding on the ground.

They take turns.

And they whack,

and whack,

whack and whack.

Until not a stem, a leaf, a branch remains.

The gardeners weep over their lost harvest.

The birds flutter homeless, their nests undone.

Broken eggs on bare soil.

Lady bugs, bees and butterflies dead, wings caught in the roaring blades.

Still, grubs and aphids and white flies and slugs remain and feast on the browning remains of the garden,

with the hooligans, bullies and soulless ones who prefer a world bare as their souls, sharing the feast.

Trump is a Terrible Gardener.

He returns to his sterile house gilded in gold.

He turns to new cruelties

Musk returns to playing cosplay soldier in empty streets.

And life peeks out, carefully.

Weeds return first as they always do, with their deeper roots,

their tough, calloused leaves that unfurl from the earth in triumph.

With canny seeds that flew into the carrying wind the second the blade felled their stems

to land in new beds and burrow in under the covering soil.

Some of the gardeners, best of the best, rescue seeds from the wreckage.

They dig up young plants and put them tenderly in new beds.

Bathe them in gentle rain.

Feed them with the best shit and rotting death they can find.

(There was far too much shit and death to find, they had an excellent selection).

Their alchemy transforming death to life

as all gardeners do.

Dandelions and flax, clover, wild strawberry, cattails and purslane.

Edible weeds.

Medicinal weeds.

The gardeners smile sadly and leave them be as they clear the space for replanting.

People have to eat something, after all.

Those who are left.

Most gardeners grow, nurture, harvest.

But some save and hide their seeds, instead, just in case.

Just in case.

They hide their work-worn hands in Sunday gloves, just in case.

And feed the soil with the abandoned hopes of harvest while they wait.

Waiting was wise

because Trump isn’t done with the weed-whacker.

He caught a glint of life, something left undestroyed

Searched through garden sheds, destroying hoes and rakes and garden hoses.

He pours neem oil and fertilizer out in piles, burning and destroying the earth beneath. And where he finds life and hope, he burns them and the whole shed down.

He only feels alive when he can make the world burn. When others are dying.

It serves to ease the boredom, the dread, the fear that fuels his cruelty.

He goes back to cheating at golf, satisfied again.

Trump is a terrible gardener.

But life finds a way.

The gardeners gather the fallen. Again. With tears in their eyes they plant them in the soil with seeds over their hearts. Honoring them.

Honoring us.

The storyteller settles a small one in her lap, resuming. She wipes a tear.

Trump fell, like all fall. It doesn’t matter how it happened, only that it did.

And though Trump is a terrible gardener, he feeds the garden, as we all do, in the end. With his shit, his rotted death.

We remember his name, a name that rings in history as does Hitler’s, Pol Pot’s, Columbus’s, Caligula’s.

No longer a name to conjure fear, but only disgust, and anger, and a determination to bring back the garden stronger than ever.

The red hat people who bought him a weed-whacker don’t remember his name.

(they absolutely remember his name, and their joy in watching him rev that engine).

But they pretend they don’t. They don’t meet your eyes.

They pretend they never knew him. The red hats.

(But we all know they cheered as the fields burned.)

And they pretend they ripped the weed-whacker out of his hands.

(The weed-whacker they handed him on a golden plate.)

But the red hat people didn’t grow the new garden.

It was the gardeners with their

castor beans and foxglove

and oleander and rue.

to make the fertilizer.

The gardeners with their

corn and beets

and basil and thyme

and wheat and luscious berries, dark and red,

to feed the people.

It was the gardeners whose toil and love and refusal to let decay end the cycle of life

who saved the garden.

Trump was a terrible gardener.

but he made mighty fine fertilizer, in the end.

As did his cheering crowds wearing red caps bloody with the deaths they craved.

Shit and rotting death always do.

“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, we return to the earth, all of us.”

The storyteller ended her tale, picked up her trowel, and placed a young, tender plant into its new dark, warm bed.

Thank you.

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