for my daughter, Helen

 

The overarching bamboo grove

in the Morikami Gardens is nothing

more than grass writ large,

or grass the way we’d see it,

if we were tiny creatures.

 

In the wet heat of Florida

it grows four feet a day,

its hollow, knuckled stems

packed with strength and music

we’ve shaped to a thousand uses –

 

from workaday tables

and chairs to screens

or the playful shishi odoshi

that scatters skittering deer

from a new plantation,

 

its equilibrium set in motion

by silver chains of water

until, with a resonant

poc! the final pipe

has struck an oblate stone.

 

And when the breeze is stirring,

the bamboo grove becomes

a fleet creaking slowly

homewards, even though its masts

are rooted in a foreign soil.