top of page

Beauty is the sole legitimate province of the poem.-Edgar Allan Poe

Poetry is when emotion has found its thought and thought has found words--Robert Frost

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance--Carl Sandburg

I have nothing to say, I am saying it, and that is poetry--John Cage

You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some of it with you--Joseph Joubert

Poetry is what in a poem makes you laugh, cry, prickle, be silent, makes your toe nails twinkle, makes you want to do this or that or nothing, makes you know that you are alone in the unknown world, that your bliss and suffering is forever shared and forever all your own. ~Dylan Thomas

joybragi84

A Flower Walk: A Short Poem and a Bunch of Pictures


Comments below the poem and with the pictures.


The Flower Walk

(Inspired by Frost’s The Pasture)


We walked out in the flowers today

And took some pictures too.

What good we got I cannot say,

But we’ll share it with you.


Each blossom is detained in time.

Its days ahead are few,

Which makes each moment more sublime,

And we’ll share it with you.


Kellie, Sarah, and I went walking on what we call the "Flower Trail" last Saturday. I have been waiting to share the pictures, but I felt like I had to write a poem first. This morning, I was reading Robert Frost's selected poems, and the first poem I read was The Pasture. It is an eight line poem like mine above but with a different rhyme and metrical scheme. I was inspired by his poem. I didn't really want to copy or mimic it. I will post it below the pictures of the flowers. Anyway, his poem gave me a great idea of what I wanted to say.


I could not identify the pink flower at the top of the page without help, so I found a cool website called Pl@ntNet Identify (https://identify.plantnet.org/) that--Guess what?--will identify flowers from pictures. I found out that the pink flower at the top of the page is a Four Valve Mimosa. Cool, huh?


The little cluster of gems above was identified as a Mock Rose Vervain. They were everywhere on our three mile hike, even on the side of the road.


The little beauty above was identified as a Wild Petunia or Straited Petunia. This is one of my favorites.


Someone had, apparently erroneously, told me that the flower above, which I also have growing in my flower bed at home, was a Nightshade. However, Pl@ntNet says that this is Spiderwort. There are several varieties of Spiderwort listed, and this looks the most like the picture of a Prairie Spiderwort.


I was pretty sure that the flower above was Bee Balm when I first saw it. According to Pl@ntNet, I could be right, but it does also look a lot like White Bergamot. I think that the purple dots that you can see if you zoom in confirm the Bee Balm, but from a ways back in looks just like White Bergamot.


The yellow flower above was on a weed that my dad would have called Bitterweed. He was notorious for calling any yellow flower that grew in a field or garden Bitterweed. Pl@ntNet says that this is either Star Tickseed or Coreopsis. I prefer Coreopsis. Who wants a flower named after ticks, which, by the way, we got a few of on our hike?


Anybody who knows me very well knows how much I love the Purple Coneflower, otherwise known as Echinacea. The Echinacea in my yard has not even shot up stalks yet while the Coneflowers in the woods along the trail were losing their petals already. I can't figure out why mine are so late or why I can't them to grow anywhere else in the yard, but you will see pictures of them when they bloom. I promise.


The red jewel above is another favorite of mine that is called by several different names, and I am not going to argue about which is correct because I don't know and I don't care. "A rose by any other name is still a rose," some famous person said. (Yes, I know from whom and from where that quote came.) The flower is called Fire Pink by some, Star Fire by others, and I grew up calling it the Indian Paintbrush. Whatever its name is, I love it.


I see a whole lot of orange Ladybugs or Ladybirds, as some call them, and quite a few red Ladybugs, but I can't remember the last time that I saw a yellow Ladybug. This one must have been young because it is still green around the edges. Maybe that is why it didn't fly away as I got close to it. The flower, by the way, is a Bee Balm.


Finally, I will post Robert Frost's The Pasture after this final note. As always, Enjoy! I guess that, since you are at the bottom of the page, I should say, "I hope that you enjoyed the pictures from "The Flower Trail" and my minikin poem. "Minikin" is an old-fashioned way of saying "little." I like old-fashioned words sometimes. Anyway...


THE PASTURE

by Robert Frost

I'm going out to clean the pasture spring; I'll only stop to rake the leaves away (And wait to watch the water clear, I may): I shan't be gone long.—You come too. I'm going out to fetch the little calf That's standing by the mother. It's so young, It totters when she licks it with her tongue. I shan't be gone long.—You come too.

Comments


I find that I cannot exist without Poetry--without eternal poetry--half the day will not do--the whole of it--I began with a little, but habit has made me a Leviathan.-John Keats

We do not quite say that the new is more valuable because it fits in; but its fitting in is a test of its value.-T. S. Eliot

A man may praise and praise, but no one recollects but that which pleases.-George Gordon, Lord Byron

The great beauty of poetry is that it makes everything in every place interesting.-John Keats

Our faulty elder poets sacrificed the passion and passionate flow of poetry to the subtleties of intellect and to the stars of wit; the moderns to the glare and glitter of a perpetual, yet broken and heterogeneous imagery, or rather to an amphibious something, made up, half of image, and half of abstract meaning. The one sacrificed the heart to the head; the other both heart and head to point and drapery.-S. T. Coleridge

The purpose of rhythm, it has always seemed to me, is to prolong the moment of contemplation, the moment when we are both asleep and awake, which is the one moment of creation.-W. B. Yeats

bottom of page