Underneath

A compact lyric about resilience, in which a tulip surviving in an industrial city becomes a figure for beauty that persists beneath hard surfaces, drawing strength from its orchard origins and a pollen ring stronger than satellites.

'Underneath' is a compact eleven-line lyric that sets a single tulip against the 'industrial city' and lets the flower win on its own terms. The tulip survives by a kind of refusal - 'Like ice around flesh it breaths not what it takes in' - and stays alive by making rather than absorbing: 'to stay alive it creates colors like a gypsy'. It is 'crushed across the summers / Both by followers of golf pros and streetwalkers', a paired class image of respectable and disreputable trampling alike, yet 'its rhyme came from an orchard', so 'lost time may remain sacred'. The closing turn is the poem's argument in miniature: city 'night life' and 'light' cannot make it 'difficult to wilt in spring', but 'the ring around its pollen, is stronger than the satellites' - biological continuance set above the era's technological reach. Short and clean, the poem reads as a quiet credo of organic persistence underneath modern machinery.