Ledger of Two Greens
Round Rock, TX
2025, Senior, Poetry & Spoken Word
i. // a suburbian dawn in Texas, 6 a.m.
The street is a held-breath hush until lawn-mower teeth gnash
and blowers flay the dew from Bermuda grass.
I chase a lone dandelion splitting the concrete joint
A tiny, ragged halo insisting on its bloom
between SUVs idling for school run.
Mom calls it a weed; I call it proof
that a fist of soil can out-argue asphalt.
Still, the air smells of gasoline and sprinkler chlorine,
and the sky flickers blue-gray like a buffering screen.
I swallow the quiet the way kids gulp pool water by accident
knowing it’s treated, tasting the bleach anyway.
i. // still 6 a.m. Texas: audit at sunrise
The laptop on the breakfast bar glows its imitation-leaf green, spilling numbers across Dad’s face
like fireflies caught in a mason jar,
Yet outside the window the lawn lies brittle and bone-colored, every blade a small cracked mirror
holding up the drought-sky.
Sprinklers hiss anyway, automatic, insistent, rehearsing the same wasteful hymn at six-oh-five
because the timer was set once and then forgotten
How would our ledgers look, I wonder, if every blossom came stapled to a receipt that listed
pollinator flight paths, shade at noon, the second life of rain?
If we printed profit-and-loss in the ink of bees’ wings, would the quarterly report read like elegy
or confession?
And who, exactly, would we owe: each other, the wind, the worms braiding the soil into breath?
The HOA mails fines in envelopes the color of turf,
urging us to keep up appearances, margins, projections.
I wonder: if balance sheets tallied pollinator wings,
would my street go bankrupt or break even?
ii. // mumbai local line—monsoon balance sheet
Rupee notes flutter from a chai-stall tin, rain-specked and cardamom-sweet, while the corrugated
roof drums out a prayer to velocity and water.
Beyond the tracks a lotus muscles upward through a broth of chip packets and rusted-coin
sludge, petals tender, being the first light on a wounded planet.
Horns tangle with temple bells; a gull’s ragged cry stitches through, and the whole city inhales
like it’s reading the world’s receipts at once.
A barefoot boy snaps my photo on a borrowed phone, promising to swipe the trash away with an
app and sell the afterimage to tourists
and for one reckless breath I believe him, until the train lurches and the lotus tilts out of sight,
flicking plastic from its shoulders like a dog shaking rain.
If beauty can bloom in a gutter, what’s our alibi for gardens gone missing?
How many tides must ferry our discarded stories to the ocean’s dark archive before we sign the
invoice stamped “PAY NOW” in salt?
Will that boy inherit a shoreline of plastic coins, or a sea where porpoises still write cursive wake
across dawn’s blue ledger?
iii. // promissory note written in mud & heartbeat
Forget carbon futures and bullet-point pledges;
What if dollars turned to seedlings in our pockets?
What if every coin sprouted roots the moment we spent it wrong?
When will we call time-out on someday
and admit the bill is already on the table,
listing fires, cracked soil, an ocean that tastes like tears?
Reflection
“Ledger of Two Greens” grew from the tug-of-war inside me: half my year is spent in a quiet Texas suburb, the other half in Mumbai’s vibrant, litter-laced streets. Seeing a lotus bloom through plastic and a lone dandelion crack suburban concrete made me ask, What if our favorite green—money—could grow the right green? That question became the spine of the poem. I shaped the piece during dawn walks and late-night train rides, jotting sensory fragments—the hiss of sprinklers, the cardamom breath of a chai stall—then weaving them into long, breath-heavy lines that mimic a ledger unspooling across two continents. Exploring Connections to Nature: Looking Inside, Going Outside convinced me that environmental crises are personal ledgers—every purchase, every plastic bottle, another line item. My message to readers and listeners is simple: the bill for our comfort has arrived.