The Green Will Rise

They laid the ground with steel and stone and called the earth subdued,
With girders rising to the sky, in triumph, proud and crude.
They paved the soil with asphalt black, they poured their roads like tar,
And swore the bush would never grow where engines groaned and sparred.

The cranes had danced like windless wings above the dying clay,
And concrete scars were cast like tombs to hold the land at bay.
They tamed the flow of ancient streams with pipes and rusted steel,
And silenced roots that once had crept through underfoot with zeal.

But under boot and wheel and wire, away from human hand,
A quiet force began to stir, deep in the dreaming land.
A seed, no wider than a tear, held fast within the seam,
It cracked a stone with gentleness, and turned towards the gleam.

A weed pushed up through blistered tar, where heat had split and bust,
A blade of green so slight, so soft, it rose from powdered dust.
No hand had placed it in the world, no gardener gave it care,
But there it stood, a sovereign stem, defiant in the glare.

A moss had made a velvet bed upon a factory wall,
Where soot once choked the creeping vine that now begins to sprawl.
The bricks were black with age and ash, the mortar flaked and grey,
But still the tendrils coiled like script where birds once flew away.

In alleys dark where bins are stacked and footfalls rarely sound,
The ferns unfurl in secret shade and root in broken ground.
A gutter clogged with bitter leaves gives home to bud and bloom,
And dandelions light the dusk with parasol perfume.

Where man has left his grandest dreams in rust and jagged glass,
The green returns with slow resolve to claim the space at last.
A windowless forgotten house, its floors a sagging shell,
Is veiled in dusky coral pea and bower vine.

The roof collapsed, the walls now split, the stair a brittle spine,
And yet a gum shoots through the tiles and leans into the shine.
Its bark is scratched with graffitied vows from decades dead and done,
But overhead, it lifts its limbs and gathers in the sun.

They tried to bury wilderness beneath a builder’s pride,
To say that progress rules the land and keeps the wild outside.
But time does not forget the song of root and leaf and loam,
The forest does not grieve the loss; it simply reclaims its home.

The vine does not petition law, the lichen files no plea,
The seed does not negotiate, its protest is to be.
With every crack in urban lines, with every brick we lay,
The quiet hands of nature reach and gently pull away.

A train line drowned in wattle bloom still hums with iron ghost,
And palms erupt in car park seams, in silence, bold and close.
No map can chart the path they take, no plan can hold them back,
They grow where they are needed most, along the softened track.

They do not speak in human terms, nor yield to spade or flame,
But rise again through drought or flood, relentless, proud, and tame.
For even scorched and trampled soil will clutch the morning dew,
And turn its blackened grief to gold with every stem that grew.

A single blade can tilt a slab, a root can break a wall,
And in the smallest patch of green, the wilderness will call.
The gardens built in structured rows may charm a fleeting eye,
But nature’s work is never neat, it’s vast and strong and sly.

With every lawn so tightly mown, a creeping patch returns,
In every fire’s afterglow, a seedling twists and yearns.
You cannot kill the will to live that lingers in the stone,
The earth reclaims, the green endures, and nothing stands alone.

Now when you pass a wall of grey or walk a railway stair,
And see a leaf that found its way through shadow, grime, and glare,
Know this: no power born of man, no tower high or deep,
Can cage the pulse that moves the roots or stop the seeds that sleep.

The green will rise without applause, without design or need,
It cares not for our monument, it only knows to breed.
The quiet war that nature wages has no fanfare, no sound,
But every bud’s a battle won, and life retakes the ground.

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