Pasture Thistles

My Hometown Poem #49

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The east front pasture
on our farm
was overgrown with flowering thistles
and scrub. 
Damn thistles, my dad would say.
You can’t run cattle with
thorns
rocks
trees
broken fence.

He handed us sickles and shovels,
and sent us
to chop the offending stalks
to pull up the rough rocks
to fix the jagged barbed wire fence.
I was of no use.
I loved the thistles
with their ripe juicy thick stems
their bursting purple blossoms,
the sticky sweet smell, 
the long opalescent white thorns
on their shafts and buds.

Clever thistles, I thought,
protecting themselves this way
from wind, from rain, from insects, from us.
I admired them so.
How could I kill them,
When nature had thoughtfully 
Provided such perfect armor?
In my heart 
I knew the inevitable truth.
The thistles would grow.
The rocks would shift.
The trees would sprout and spread.
The fence would fall.

Later, when the world tried 
to tame me, 
to tear me down,
I became a pasture thistle. 
I grew thorns, 
to defend myself.
I dug into the earth 
With fierce determination
And bloomed.

Do you know about the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative?

Here are the members of the Iowa Writers Collaborative in alphabetical order.

Laura Belin: Iowa Politics with Laura Belin

Doug Burns: The Iowa Mercury

Dave Busiek: Dave Busiek on Media

Art Cullen: Art Cullen’s Notebook

Suzanna de Baca Dispatches from the Heartland

Debra Engle: A Whole New World

Julie Gammack: Julie Gammack’s Iowa Potluck

Beth Hoffman: In the Dirt

Dana James: New Black Iowa 

Robert Leonard: Deep Midwest: Politics and Culture

Chuck Offenburger: Iowa Boy Chuck Offenburger

Mary Swander: Mary Swander’s Buggy Land

Ed Tibbetts: Along the Mississippi

Iowa Writers Collaborative: Iowa Writers Collaborative