From centenarian trees to small flowers blooming through cracks in the concrete, plants have shown that life is as simple and complicated as putting down roots and absorbing the sun.

Plants have been fighting storms and blizzards, heatwaves and droughts for millions of years. Today, with climate change, the expansion of urban landscape, the wildfires and the unregulated deforestation, being resilient sometimes seems to be all a plant can do.

In some ways, words are like plants.

Tenacious. Defiant. Even when cut down, uprooted, stepped on, erased, their seeds still fall on the ground, their pollen travels with the wind. Eventually, they sprout and grow into poems all over again.

In this garden of an issue of Eye to the Telescope, the twenty poems blooming from the underworld to outer space and everywhere in between will take us into a journey about memory, adaptability, change and hope.

I would like to thank everyone who submitted and trusted me with their work. It has been a pleasure to edit this issue and I hope you will enjoy it as much as I did.