Eli Spivakovsky writes, Carl Scharwath shoots

Little flower growing through a crack in the pavement, through a crack in the asphalt, quietly and steadily. Push, push, little flower, you must assert yourself as you grow defiantly against the oppressiveness of what passes for civilisation. You must go against your gentleness a little if you want to stay gentle and call it growth as you rise towards the loyal and generous sunlight. The children are closed-up in their schools, the elderly are closed-up in their facility, the truly gentle are locked behind Doctor's doors, forced in prisons and only brutes remain, sizing each other up and spitting at each other with their eyes, never thanking the tram driver and forgetting to inquire of the cab driver about his day. Indifferent and apathetic, they go from A to B without heralding your soft subtlety, without remaking on your gutsy tenderness, not remembering that they are journeying as they aim only to be average, and without beholding the beggar, never looking down to the sweet plant and her nascent existence. Little by little, you provide an example to the downtrodden, a reminder to the barren, polluted city that she was once a field. An insult to bankers, an insult to corporate lawyers, you grow freely and completely for free. Oh, fragility, oh, vulnerability, oh innocence, oh humility, oh gentleness! You are up against it every day, pushed against the hard and cold machinery, thrown against calculators, shoved between the entrance and the exit of factories, against the intolerant selfishness that zig-zags through the crowded, molten markets and their aggressive game of consume and produce. Little flower, you are stronger than all the tar in all the world.

 Birth -- Carl Scharwath

Shanti Harjani Williams writes, Carl Scharwath shoots

If you would cry
If you would flood the river bank with your sun-dried tears I would choke back my own  For to witness the workings of your words
Shall leave me scarcely rooted
As my love is sometimes
When uprooted by my slim pickings of yours
But to behold your tears
If you should ever have them
To see them fall everywhere
As the sun falls around a shady tree
And takes to the day with its sun drenched kisses
If you should cry for me
I should let the ashen dew become the mist over my eyes
I should fall in love with the stars at night
I would become like a thief in the overgrown woods
Stealing the drops that accumulate in the full grown moss
Wiping my eyes with the leaves that grow densely
In an overpopulated paradise
If you should cry for me
I would dry your tears with mine eyes.

 -- Carl Scharwath

Carl Scharwath writes, Alona Tuballa Alagasi shoots

Alona Tuballa Alagasi -- Alona Tuballa Alagasi

Carl Scharwath shoots, Sharon Dina Rose Regala writes

Silence echoes
within the walls
of her mind.
Your memory breathes
deep,
within the
boundary of real
and imaginary.
Your distance is
not only felt,
measured
by the thousands of miles in
separation,
...but also by those
little steps not taken...