My Body Is a Garden

By Maryna Smahina on November 18, 2018

My body is a garden. I bear this big juicy fruit inside it. I can feel it in my chest, growing, getting heavier day by day, it is hanging there like my future is hanging in the air, a promise of sweetness and ripeness.
I trust it like the gardener trusts his trees to grow.
I long for it like a child longs for summer to warm the soil up.
Sometimes it feels like a burden not letting me go.
More often it is filled with the joy of the expectations I don’t quite understand.
I want to take it. To pick it. I want to know all the answers.
I know I have to wait.
Maybe that is why I’m so sure it is not going to hang there forever for there is Eve in me striving to get it. And she always wins.

Your body is a gardener. You shape me. You give me my senses. You release me. You discover my beauty for I can not realize it from the inside, I can’t see everything, you can. You take care of the fruit trees, you pick berries to try, to feel the juice on your lips, to taste the sweetness in your mouth.
Your hands are gentle. Your eyes are full of thought. You can see when I am ready, when the garden is ready, when the fruit of the promises and hopes I bear inside me is filled with enough sunshine, and water, and tender winds. You never pick it yourself. You leave it for Eve to taste it first. For her to be free. For her to become my words.

I am a young Ukrainian author with two published novels: ‘Volkovytsi’ (2016) and ‘The Room’ (2018). Originally from the South of Ukraine, now I live in Kyiv, where I write and translate books. Currently, I’m working on a children book and some short stories.

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