Little Things
This poem won second place in the 2023 Spark! Youth Poetry Competition at the Las Vegas Book Festival.
By Eva Toplak
I had a mint plant once
I killed it because I kept overwatering it.
I tried so hard to keep that plant alive,
And in the end that’s exactly why it died.
Love is like that, I think.
Sometimes, at least, the people who love you the most
Are the ones who hurt you so.
And that isn’t to say that they wanted to,
Nor that they don’t love you.
It’s just because they know that they
Can get away with it.
Or maybe it’s just because they can.
Maybe love, like greed, and power, and money
Corrupts.
Walking along those subtle streets,
Surrounded by love.
All it’s meant to do is help you to breathe,
And instead, it suffocates you, steals your heart’s quick beats.
Crushed down by the weight of this love
This tsunami of emotions you can’t control
Killing you for all it wants to save your soul.
I had a mint plant.
There was supposed to be nothing I could do to kill it.
That’s why I got it in the first place.
I thought that if I could keep it alive,
Maybe I could find a way to save my own mind.
But my desire to see it thrive is eventually what made it die.
And I wonder if my own life is the same.
All those people who know my name,
Who say they love me and truly do,
Their desire to see me through
Is the reason that I stand before you
With pieces missing.
And I don’t blame them. How could I?
It’s because of them, after all, that I know I can survive
Everything and anything life puts in my hands.
But it is too much to ask
That they just put down the watering cans?
Find a new way to love me,
I want to scream.
But my voice stays quiet,
Breath stolen before I can channel it to break the silence.
Just like that mint plant,
My roots run deep.
I’ve created a life that, for the first time, supports me.
And I know that running water, however strong,
Won’t cause me to lose my grip nor silence my growing song.
But sometimes I wish
I didn’t have to fight the crushing tish of love, of water.
I am not here to be baptized anew.
I am happy with my life without it being sent askew.
So don’t pity me when I ask for a new form of love.
I am a mint plant,
An unkillable yet dying mat of ever changing vines and leaves.
And I don’t need you to water me simply
because that’s the only way you know how to love something.
I think so often we forget the little things.
The hundreds of thousands of small ways that love can be used to heal
Rather than hurt
We don’t need to love with the force of a hurricane in only one way.
Love me instead with the force of a whisper in a million styles,
And I promise you, you and I will both be better for it after a little while.
I had a mint plant once.
I killed it by giving it too much of the wrong kind of love.
And at the end of the day,
you are now doing the same.
Eva Toplak is a recent graduate of West Career and Technical Academy in Las Vegas who will be attending California Lutheran University in the fall to study Molecular Biology and Biochemistry. In her free time, she enjoys practicing the alto saxophone, playing tennis, and, of course, writing poetry.
Photo courtesy of Eva Toplak.