The ways of the lotus

Trope and symbol
rises now and now reclines
in the currency of power
and yet so  non-aligned,
bloomage of an artist’s imagination
watered by histories
and preferred extrapolation —
the unpaid stamp-duty
of commissioned omission
and republics squandered;
pavements meanwhile
agitate for compensation
speak of narratives obscured
the footnoted stories of the submerged
the roots that sifted soil
picked nutrients
made for fragrance and texture
and reed songs wrecked
by excessive love
equal to hatreds unresolved;
and as for the lotus
through abstraction and misrepresentation
away from metropole and galleried effusion
it rises, the lotus does
as it has, as it must,
again and again.