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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
Mar 313 min read

An Early Purple Iris: A Poem and More Pictures from Spring Break


The Early Iris Bloom

 

The stretching stem shoots through the mulching grass.

It tries to reach the sun and must not fail.

The new bloom calls for kisses from the clouds

And raindrops fall to tickle beardlets pale.

Today, the northern wind is stiff and cold.

Too bad, the iris might have sprung too fast.

I cut the bud and pressed it in a book.

Kept there, it may not grow, but it will last.

Someday, perhaps in years, I may recall

The sprout that lived and died without a scream

And find the pages where its odors fail

And think its life was nothing but a dream.


This poem is in keeping with the Poem-a-Week project that I started--what?--a month ago? Two months ago? I will be honest. I wrote this poem in about thirty minutes this morning. As Paul Simon once said about his songs, "The good ones come out in a hurry because they want to be out." I'll let you be the judge of whether this poem is any good, but it did not take long to write. Email me and let me know what you think.


How about another picture of an iris from the yard?



Okay, now some pictures from Day Two of our Spring Break trip (a very short one!) to Eminence, MO and the surrounding area.


The Current River from a Bluff at Powder Spring.



A Cave at Powder Spring Recreation Area along the Hiking Trail



Part of the Wild Horse Herd


A short note here: Kellie and I had heard about the wild horses in the Eminence area since we started going there regularly about five years ago. We had seen plenty of poop evidence for the horses, but we had never seen the horse before. These four (One is hiding behind the closest horse. You can see the extra legs.) were in a herd of ten near Prairie Hollow Grove. We saw another smaller herd later in another field near Shawnee Creek. So, we saw them not once but twice on this particular day.


Of course, you may be familiar with Alley Spring Mill (above) by now. It is one of our favorite visiting and hiking spots. I take a picture from the same place every time we go there, and every picture looks different.


Finally, for today--and I wish I had a better shot--is the Devil's Well. It is a hole in the ground that opens into an underground lake. You can see that public access to the hole has been blocked with metal grates. My hands are sticking through metal bars that also blocks entry way so that I could get this picture. According to the literature posted at the site, the lake is 100 feet below the surface of the ground at this point, and the water is 80 to 150 feet deep. The water level rises and falls inside of the cave seasonally. The lake comes out of the Earth at Cave Springs which quickly flows into the Current River. Kellie and I have saved the hike to Cave Springs for another day when we can start early because it is a nine mile hike in and out. As always, I hope that you have enjoyed this short foray into my life and my mind. Let me know what you think.



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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

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