The garden is exploding.

Fire is devouring the thorny white roses
Ravenous like a prowling tiger
Petals charring black.

The great booms like colliding planes
Echo on the mountainsides
Reverberating
Making the deep green pools shiver
Ripples spreading, multiplying.

The air is heavy with smoke
Soaked to saturation
Wilting the whitening willows
Leafy tendrils draping
Dragging
Like a dying man's arms.

The lilies twist in the cyclones
Delicate daisies blasted by arrow raindrops
Tiny roots straining for survival
Silent screams.

Silence.

Dust settling
Clearing
Smoke blanketing the earth like gray snow
Steamy ribbons rising from the soil
The sky flaming distantly.

There is no silence
Like that of death.

And yet
Falsified life
Brings falsified death.

The lovely fragrant flowers
Lie in puddles of melted
Plastic
Their false beauty revealed.

The willows
Green leaves burned away
Stand as metal skeletons
No more than imitations.

The green pond
Flaming still
A rainbow of oil.

Nothing real
Nothing real
Ugliness exposed in
Death
The murdered paradise
All a lie.

And then

There is life
Sprouting, spreading its
Sweet young branches
And it is real and alive
No longer smothered by
The artificial immaculacy
Of the garden's ruse.

Its flowered face tastes the wind
Roots spreading
Deepening
Strong
Beautiful in its purity.

It grows
Reaching upward, its tallest branches
Brushing the dusty blue sky
Leaving trails of thin clouds
That give sweet rain
To replenish the charred soil.

The garden
Is reborn.