The Callery Pear
Even with our pretty white flowers and fancy autumn dresses, people call my kind a pest, invading proper gardens and blooming where we aren’t wanted, the leaves of so many sisters sprayed with toxins or their heads lopped off with a chain saw, their stumps painted with poison to annihilate them and make room for natives only. On the day the towers fell, everything changed— my crown was severed by the weightiness of broken steel and stone— my bones cracked— my roots and limbs snapped— my trunk blackened. Mortally wounded, still I pushed my leaves above the rubble into the lingering smoke and ash. Tender hands found me, nursed me back to health, and brought me home again. The towers are gone. Throughout the land my sisters remain reviled, yet here I proudly stand, a symbol of hope and survival. Once a dove nested in my boughs. Every spring I wait for her return.
