Rot and Root
Read more poetry by Britt Wolfe
I come from a garden
that devours its own.
Where roots don’t hold—
they strangle.
Where the soil whispers, stay,
and means, sink.
Everything there feeds on everything else.
Sunlight is rationed,
kindness a myth told to seedlings
before they learn what grows here
and what gets buried.
When I first reached for the sky,
they called it arrogance.
When I dared to bloom,
they tore the petals clean off—
said I was ungrateful
for wanting air.
They said I was part of them,
but they never meant it as love.
They meant, if we choose not to grow,
neither will you.
They meant, come back to the rot,
and call it home.
But I have seen what waits above the canopy—
a sky vast enough to forget their hunger.
I have felt the ache of wind
against new leaves,
the dangerous joy
of not being owned by the dark.
Let them keep their choking garden,
their jealous roots twisting
around one another in worship of decay.
I will not return.
I am not theirs anymore.
I tore free—
bleeding, yes,
but alive.
And the bloom they tried to crush
has learned to seed itself elsewhere.
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Poetry Anthologies by Britt Wolfe:
