The Weed I Almost Pulled

a poem by Roger B. Rueda

There it was—unbidden,

between the stones where I plant what I know,

what I name, what blooms when told.

A weed, I said. A stray. A freeloader

in the ordered orchestra of my garden.

It did not argue.

It swayed. It stayed.

It drank the sun as if it had earned it.

I almost tore it by the root.

Almost—

until a page,

a book,

a whisper in a corner of an herbarium,

said its name not with contempt

but reverence:

woundwort. healer. guardian of the liver.

silent mender of what the world breaks.

I paused.

I looked again.

Its leaves, rough as regret,

its stem, stubborn as memory.

Its scent—bitter, yes,

but haven’t I too smelled bitter

when trying to be strong?

Since then, all the weeds—

the spindly ones, the creeping vines,

those who flower only when no one watches—

I have looked at with new eyes.

As one might look at the overlooked child

who sings to herself in the attic.

They know things.

The weeds.

They hold secrets not meant for order

but for need.

Their medicine is not for show,

but for despair.

For the wound beneath the polite wound.

Love, too, is like this,

I suspect—

wild, unruly,

growing in wrong places

until you see it is the only right one.

And death,

that obsessive gardener,

may think to snip and prune and finish—

but the weed survives.

And in it, sometimes,

so do we.