"Weed in a French Garden," by Madison Mainwaring (Poetry '19)

Madison Mainwaring, a 2019 poetry alum, was recently featured in Bracken. Read an excerpt of Mainwaring’s poem “Weed in a French Garden” below:

The horticulturalists, astronauts
with clippers, shape the hedges
in straight lines, their hands firm

with a blade. In this stilled pool
of beauty, there’s no “outside,”
no nature at all, really.

Even the sun here
is in fact not the sun,
harnessed like a cheetah in a cage

as elaborate metaphor
for the absolute power of the king.
Don’t be tricked by the lack of a fence,

the eighteen signs saying bienvenu.
You are not meant to be
in this world. The light is deigned.

“Weed in a French Garden,” by Madison Mainwaring (Poetry ’19)