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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

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New Pictures, An Old Poem: Purple Thistles

Well, I needed to take a day off from the England Travelogue for two reasons. One, I was getting tired of spending 1 1/2 to 2 hours a day transferring photos from my phone to the computer, figuring out what they were, cropping them, naming them, and uploading them to the blog site. Yeah, that's right. I wasn't spending the time on the travelogue writing. I was spending 95% of my time on the very monotonous activity of moving pictures around. Two, it is time to do some creative writing.

So, I don't have any creative writing of which to speak. I have started a few things (a couple of poems and a Dewey Lynne story) but have made no headway. A good routine or consistent mood of creative writing has been eluding me in the midst of the travelogue. However, I do have a couple of cool pictures that Kellie took on our daily walks, so I will share them with you and use them to frame The Purple Thistle (Old #5). You remember this one don't you? As always, ENJOY! --ahem, something different for today.


The Purple Thistle

(Old #5)


In the rustling breath of harvest twilight,

The purple thistle spreads its frosty leaves,

Grasping wisps of eastern silver sky light

And evanescent nips of Autumn eves

Yet does not yield to peaceful sleep too soon

In the soothing aura of mother moon.


Held fast in fertile soil with heavy sigh,

Tall grasses wag their lush seeds in the wind

Strewing for migrant birds a food supply

And tickling drowsy cows upon the chin

While twisting supple torsos to a tune

Pronounced in silence by the rising moon.


Black-eyed Susan blooms bump Queen Anne’s fine lace

Smearing sinless white licentious yellow.

A green grasshopper springs in empty space;

A sleek barn swallow stabs the poor fellow

And skitters to his nest with scratch-legged boon,

His sickle shadow on the bald-faced moon.


The thistle whispers in its zealous sleep

A savior’s myth that whips through fervent dreams.

Bedecked in thorns and swathed in purple deep,

The thistle knows no suffering nor seems,

Its faith a tricky hieroglyph or rune

Translated by old lovers of the moon.


Now, both horizons blush a wounded red,

But neither orb bobs in a brightening sky.

The sleepy thistle rises from the dead

Or from a dream in which it cannot die.

The moon is gone; the sun razes the gray.

A farmer with a spray tank walks that way.


Assured it has no rot or leaf disease,

The flower flaunts its health and beams with pride.

The man believes it’s just a weed he sees

And cures the nuisance with an herbicide.

From a brass nozzle, poison mists whistle

Crusting and killing the guiltless thistle.


Slender tan grasses bend in passive bows.

Tired winds weave lazy circles to nestle

Near the bristly noses of blissful cows

In a reformed field without one thistle.

They murmur and warble as if to croon

But sing no excuse to the chary moon.



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

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