Thistles and Thorns
LOVE POEM #4: The pathway to passion. Barbed beginnings. Soft landings.
My garden is restless,
my garden is free,
my garden is rooted in anarchy.
With hard, twisted fingers
it threatens and warns.
My garden is nettles and thistles and thorns.
Its honeysuckle regal weeds
will bind our feet, a circumstance
that forces talk, forks loamy seeds
that bud into romance.
Let’s walk together through the trees,
their leaves surround us, rustled trance,
our fiery smoke disturbs the bees,
on wing,
they sting,
a game of chance.
Let’s gather fate, hastily,
tumble down
and in each other’s ardour drown.
Let’s slip beneath the eiderdown.
Let’s kiss, grow wild, let’s dance.
A LARGE PART OF my garden is literally nettles, thistles, thorns and a lot more wildness besides. As I clear a springtime pathway through it, an act of destructive construction, I ease access to its spontaneous wastes. Dry twigs drop from trees as I brush past. Wildflowers – snowdrops, bluebells, primroses – are in April bloom. The occasional smell of neglected mint. Huge tangles of spiky weed-bush.
It’s very English; woody and dead-crackling underfoot. It brings simple, primal words to mind: a place full of stuff, where things can be, living in a vague and unrestrained space.
It’s so tempting to rhapsodise about this sort of scenery – “let nature be free!” – but that’s generally because of its variance from the forced order of urban landscapes. When nature is actually free, it impedes, it tangles, it throttles, it defends itself. My poem is animated by this contrast, representing love’s common course: a snarled natural world, alien and complex, penetrated and overcome with soft devotion, with velvet passion. Nature transformed.
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Wow, speaking of rhythm! This is wonderful. It reads like a carriage ride.
What fun this was to read. Kudos!!