They say I’m frivolous, a frill, a can-can dancer, a chancer; they say I’m all talk and no action.
They say I’m 95% water, wavering and green, a dizzy queen boasting of her salad days, dazed.
They say I’ve got no insides inside, nothing but air there; that I’m all flourish, unable to nourish.
Let us consider the facts. I may be mostly water, but so are you. If water were a vegetable, it
would look like me; billow after billow both moving and contained. Rhythm sustained. A
stationary fish. A wish. A wave as thin as a blade. Mermaid.
Solid rain, I must be devoured fresh; I cannot be baked or roasted or fried, frozen or dried. I am
purely myself, the smallest leaf a true copy of the largest, a series of herbaceous echoes. Fling
each layer aside – I’ve nothing to hide. It’s all me, all the way through. I’m true.
They say I taste of nothing, but that is because they have burnt their tongues on bitter fare and
my savour is subtle. I taste of spring, its cool nights, its dew-bespangled dawns. Like a new-laid
lawn, I am full of expectation, regeneration.
Let me lay my cool wrists on your fevered cheeks.
— from Juniper Volume 6, Issue 2