The Gardens Poem by Frank Bana

Here the gardens fenced and walled
Hold no fauna for my poetry
But the Goddess has been good to me
She gives me work to nourish me
In the pain of living wild, remaining sane

After rain and climate change
Walking to the morning train
Leaves are fallen golden brown
Crushed to slickness underfoot
Reaching through the concrete
To seize life at the root

The birds seem to be thinning out
The times they neither clothe nor suit
Caught by the fences, in the netting
Unremarked and left unheard
They pile up in the chambers of forgetting

While to my ears come other songs
The fall of the beat, the note of defeat
No way to evade this atmosphere
The leaves dissolve like snowflakes on air

None of the gardens fenced and walled
Hold a motif for my poetry here
I have seen it all, good fella
The grand yachts in Marbella
Sade singing, love is king!
I am not yet in that pit
I remember how to sing
I have not reached the very bottom yet

Broken here, irrevocably
I cannot love as I must love
Earth, She, and the stars above
Until hope is lost to me
And the gardens fenced and barred
Hold no sentries to safeguard my poetry.