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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

Sshhh…Don’t Tell Anyone! A Poem from the New Book Atheists and Empty Spaces



Anyway, you will probably notice right away in looking at the title of the poem that it is called Old #5. That is because this is the fifth version of the poem that I remember. Obviously, I have a strange fascination with this most beautiful of flowers that is also a wretched weed that ruins fields with its ability to spread quickly and to survive most attempts to weed it out. I wrote the first version of this poem, which I will place below the new one, back when I was helping Carroll Hicklin on his farm. We had just spent a whole day spraying, chopping, and digging up purple thistles in one of his hay fields. We did successfully stop the spread of the thistles at that time, but I remember early that morning as the dew had glistened in the sunlight on the purple flowers and hairy stems how gorgeous these horrible weeds were. I recall going home, taking a shower, and writing the poem in about five minutes or less. I guess that I thought about it all day.


The two pictures accompanying this blog were taken by Kellie and me in our contest of who can take the best picture. I am not going to tell you who took which one. Email me and let me know which one you like best. Enjoy!


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.


Here is the earliest version that I can find of the poem The Purple Thistle. I do not see a date on it, but I started working with Carroll around 1996 or so. Therefore, I would place it between 1996 and 2000.

The Purple Thistle


In the rusty breath of dusty summer twilight,

The purple thistle spreads frosty leaves

To the glistering twists of faltering light

And yields not to the sleepy peace

of the sordid moon.


Bowing pregnantly in this heavy sigh,

Lesbidisia and Fescue acknowledge royalty

And vainly supply the ground with grain

(Whiskers tickle the lazy cow's chin.)

While bending slender torsos to the music

Of a holy war.


Black-eyed Susan bumps Queen Anne's lace

And the industrious mouse chews at the bitterness

Of the skunk flavored chokeweed, yellow

And green in its courageous cowardice.

A fat black grasshopper leaps and is stabbed

In the beak of a whispering barnswallow.


The thistle quivers with anticipation

As myths of a savior whip through dream's stages,

Decked in purple, crowned with thorns

Radiant in the depths of divine sacrifice.

(A lone man approaches with a yellow tank on his back.)

The faith is unwavering in tricky

Early moonlight.


Cattails reflect in the shimmering smoothness

Of the violet sky in the frog-infested pond.

The purple thistle is without a mirror image

And lives on what it sees in dreams.

(But the man thinks he knows what he sees.)

Decked in purple, crowned with thorns,

Radiant in the depths of divine sacrifice,

And confident in its lack of disease,

The thistle stands still in the dusty breeze.


In the black hose, poison mist whistles

And fogs the thistle from a blunt brass nozzle.

The grass withers in fairy circles.

Tomorrow's sun will toast frosty thorns

And the Savior's myth will not be reborn.



The grass waves in golden brown rows

And tender shoots green the nose of grazing cows.

The wind draws circles as though to nestle

In this fertile field without one thistle

And no more will it purr and whistle

Across frosty thorns and purple crowns

In the rusty breath

Of the dusty summer twilight.


Please make sure and let me know which you like the best, and, if you can express why, let me know that 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

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