They had spent years making Brooklyn Bridge Park
Making it wild, overgrown, teeming, leafy, lively,
When the first two-spotted ladybug sighted in New York City in thirty years
Appeared among its catalpas;
This ladybug eats aphids, see,
And most aphids are killed by chemicals no sooner than they first emerge,
But the park gardener let multiply, and so the two-spotted judge pronounced
New York was dead, and is alive again,
Was lost, and is found
They had spent seconds talking about their no-longer neighbor on Rock Hollow Road
Extolling his virtues, how much he’d be missed,
When first mention was made of his lawn’s legacy
And their doubts about its continuity;
The first time John saw it, he swore it was turf
Disbelieving in grass so pristine
When Brandon tried tending his own little plot
It never was as au courant or as green
Unmoving, each angle, in lockstep, each blade.
As if they were afraid.
Surrounded by hungry eyes, inescapable prescriptive gaze,
Exhausted, bound from birth to the stage, the grass stayed
Unaware that in Brooklyn the grass ruled its own earth
And everywhere, everything, last before first, was rising upward, blooming forward
Beach plums and beardtongues, foamflowers and redbuds
Catbirds and silversides and leafhoppers and muskrats and mourning doves
The pond slider, the spring peeper, the butterfish, the turkey tail
The red-winged blackbird, the orb weaver, the ragweed;
Side by side with all others, all free,
The grass grows as only it knows