ODE TO THE CONCRETE JUNGLE WHICH DREAMS IN CHLOROPHYLL
Dhaka, Bangladesh
2025, Junior, Poetry & Spoken Word
I. The pavement splits and whispers lullabies—
dandelion tongues lick asphalt
spelling perhaps in Braille
My grandmother’s ghost kneels here.
pressing ear against concrete like stethoscope
“Child, even steel girders miss the taste of rain.”
We construct upward but the world recalls
how to hide roots under skyscrapers
how to make a moss quilt
over parking lot wounds. The river?
Oh, she’s alive yet—
Just learning to waltz down storm drains
with filth arrayed, like morbid, beaded panes
II. ‘Question of the ages:’
If a tree should fall in the subway station,
Does it have any noise?
(Yes—the echo wears Converse,
sings Kendrick Lamar
returns home with soil in its pockets.)
The pigeons understand. They chirp in Morse.
read Whitman between puffs of exhaust.
“Look,” they swoon, “your high-rise balconies”
are nothing but cliffs with better Wi-Fi.
III. My therapist tells me to ‘get more sunlight’.
thus I baptize the sunbeam slicing through my fire escape
“‘Unconditional Love in 480p.'”
The bodega cat—preserver of urban wild information
blinks slowly:
“Vitamin D is free, kid.”
And so is breathing. Stop commodifying miracles.
IV. At the community garden,
we bury plastic forks like dead soldiers
place tomatoes in retired Nike shoe boxes.
The soil here communicates in Spanglish and Yoruba.
whispers of ancestors who had worn the land
like a second skin. My brown hands, like the Mississippi,
dig—excavating a Pepsi can, a subway token
and under it all:
one ladybug, cleaning its wings
as if it’s preparing for the revolution.
V. ‘Final offer:’
Let us rewrite the zoning laws in iambic pentameter.
turn oil spills into sonnets
make the Hudson rap its trauma.
The future’s blueprint?
A fusion of fire escape and forest canopy—
where the elevators smell like pine
where each condominium comes alive.
Hark—the wind is composing a new hymn
in the sycamores’ and scaffolding’s language.
It is like laughter.
Sounds like ‘not too late’.
It is similar to your pulse when the moon is low like a streetlight when you know: you’ve ever been both the concrete and the crack.
Reflection
This poem grew like a weed in crack sidewalks—accidental, insistent, fed by paradoxes. I have always lived in cities where nature shudders at the edges: a dandelion flourishing in spite of a tire track, pigeons chanting verse in exhaust fumes. The idea took hold when I saw a sapling growing up through a chain-link fence behind my building. It was not "lovely." It was *living*, stubborn, rewriting the city script. I wanted to isolate that strain—how concrete and chlorophyll shadow each other, how we build skyscrapers but hunger for dirt. It was like excavating to write it. I dug up metaphors from subway grates and bodega cats, let the river rap its trauma, made zoning laws dance in iambic pentameter. Poetry was the only vehicle dirty enough to hold it all—the jokes, the grief, the plastic forks buried like dead soldiers. I've used words to autopsy the world for eternity, but this time the world autopsied *me*. The Ocean Awareness prompt (*Connections to Nature*) forced me to see the ways we commodify miracles: sunlight as "Vitamin D therapy," dirt as "real estate." But the poem reminded me resistance is gentle. A ladybug plotting revolution, a grandmother's ghost hearing steel girders—these are not daydreams. They're maps. We're *both* the concrete and the crack. To readers: Your heartbeat's already in the hymn. The next line? Maybe it's a garden community. Maybe it's smiling when the wind brings *not too late*. Anyway, don't hold your breath. The skyline is a forest in disguise.