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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
Feb 23, 20232 min read

Tiny Purple Flower in the Fence at the Rodeo Arena

Comments are below the poem.


Tiny Purple Flower in the Fence at the Rodeo Arena


Kings and queens don expensive robes

Of royal violet hue,

But mauve’s your tint each dawn you last

Clothed in the morning dew.


Princesses dress in sparkling gowns

So that they might be seen.

You’re shaded by a pipe-post fence

Mostly concealed in green.


Princes restrain high-stepping steeds

To keep a martial beat,

You live each day rooted but free

Beneath the horses’ feet.


I know no one of noble blood

To whom I’d bend a knee,

But I have knelt in mud to glimpse

Your purple modesty.


How did you like the title? Wordsworthian, huh? The Tiny Purple Flower That I Saw While Passing a Place in 1804! Well, I have exaggerating that example title a little bit, but I couldn't fit where the real flower was into my poem, so I put it in the title. Okay? That is the reason for the long descriptive title.


The picture of the tiny purple flower makes it seem that it might be just a regular ol' average size flower, but I really did get down on my knees in the mud and wet grass to get a comparison of it size so that I could inform you, my good readers, about it. It is roughly half the width of my thumbnail from end of petal to end of petal. The brownish-gray pipe-looking things are grass stems. Yep, the flower is that tiny. I even zoomed in beyond Kellie's camera zoom.


Yesterday, I got the measurement of the flower while I was walking with Luna, our dog. Kellie took the picture of the purple flower two or three days ago on our walk at the park. I really am not making up the title nor the biographical parts of the poem. The flower is under the fence at the rodeo arena at the Fulton County fairgrounds. I took another picture that day of some yellow flowers that were randomly growing in a field in the park below the pond. Let me go get it from my phone.


Now, I was about to give you a lesson on whether these yellow flowers are daffodils, jonquils, or Easter lilies, so I went to Google to check my memory about which flower is which and WHOOPS! That didn't help. All jonquils are members of the narcissus subfamily and are daffodils, but not all daffodils are jonquils. Easter lilies are true lilies and are members of the lilium subfamily, but jonquils and daffodils are in the narcissus subfamily. Both the narcissus and lilium subfamilies are in the amaryllis family. People call them lots of different things. Different people call the same plant different things in different places. They are not wrong, according to the online encyclopedia Britannica. Hmm... just look at the pictures! You can make them bigger and see them better by clicking on them


As always, ENJOY!

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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