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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

More May Flowers and Another Old Poem Blooming Again


Anyway, we start off today with a close up of some flowers on a bush that I have no memories of what it was called, but it was purchased at a nursery somewhere. I planted it where it is by an old cedar stump, and it has not thrived. Many summers, I have thought it dead. It lives! This is the first time that I looked at the blooms very closely. It's kinda neat.


This is a close up of an asparagus bloom. I thought it was cool how the tips seem to be glowing as if they have a light inside of them. If you know asparagus, you know that I missed a chance to eat this delicious sprout about a week before. Shame on me!


This is the most beautiful color of iris that I have--just my personal taste in colors. I only had this stalk of blooms in this purple and black. There are no other plants that look like they will have flowers. Still, this one stem had three flowers on it.


Remember the unknown bush from above? This is a bundle of blooms on the other side of that bush. Some of the individual flowers are exquisite.


Okay, now, remember the iris bloom from above? This is a closeup of one of the blooms below the other one. I really, really like the tiger-like stripes on either side of the beard.


Well, you know me by now. I see something weird, strange, or colorful, and I like to take a picture of it. A live oak tree in the yard has these three distinct colors of moss, lichen, or algae growing on it. The all look very alien if you zoom in on them. The color of blue on the lichens is very beautiful, almost robin egg blue.



Finally, above we have two different pictures of wild roses. I have some in my yard, but the ones across the back road in the woods had many more full bunches of flowers on it, so I got the pictures of the ones in the woods. On the top picture, some kind of bug decided it would like to model for me. Little stinker!


Oh, yeah! The poem! This one is taken from the middle of a poem that I wrote in 1984 just after I got out of high school. The whole poem was probably what you might expect an eighteen year old to write. It wasn't very good. And I should probably also admit that I took twelve lines from the original poem, changed them around a bit, and added one line to each stanza. Then, I named it something that has nothing to do with the original poem. It is a different poem, but it is also the same poem. I think there might be some irony in that. Enjoy!


Irony

Stones grow up

Through browning grass.

Rain erodes soil from

Around all their roots.


Lightning struck limbs

Stripped of gray bark

Wave shiny green leaves

On their whipping tips.


A stump of an oak tree,

A mealy, brown trunk,

Stands supported by twisting ivy,

Briary vines that killed it.


Stones roll in water currents

Wear into round brown pebbles

Break into angular sand crystals

Then settle as silt near the sea.

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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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