I find myself, on occasion,

Pondering thistles;

A peculiar topic

A little threadbare

A paltry preoccupation – not too much there

Spindly, green

Tickle-thick little pricks

Purple-proud maws in a starburst array

Mauve-merry caltrops that will ruin your day

A thistle is off-putting

Jagged and small

Unlikely to inspire awe,

Or anything at all

Won’t attract any suitors,

Attend afternoon tea,

Or even be planted intentionally

Yet, a thistle has no malice

A thistle doesn’t feel the lack of its own need

Doesn’t know that it can sting

Doesn’t know that it is a “weed”

A thistle does not yearn 

Does not, “pine for the fjords”

Or dream about blossoming into a rose

A thistle just exists

A thistle just… grows

How to be what it is

Is what a thistle knows.

Not how to be subtle

Or blunt her own edges

No shame in scraping

Or scratching the hedges

How she sticks like a burr–

We could say of her

That it’s really quite clever

For her to have thrived as she has

Given how gangly – ungainly – she grows.

That, “she’s a survivor”

Full of strength and hidden beauty

Unjustly maligned

And misunderstood

Teach others to tend her

For their ultimate good–

But to do so would be a very cruel thing indeed

To project the identity we’d like her to heed

An identity

She never once claimed for herself

To force upon her wishes unuttered

Begrudgingly accommodate her existence

Titrate tinctures of her more palatable portions

And tally the sum total of her tolerable traits

As though we are the sole arbiters of “what’s good”

To judge how worthy the acuteness of her angles,

Force her into – or out of – our gardens

Rather than heed her warnings

Or even note the truth of her degrees–  

And we do measure in metric

On the razor’s edge of a millionth of a meter

For she has been honed thus sharply 

And she deserves at least that much

Instead, we paint her with pigments–

Such royal hues!

As if any of our pedestrian pageantry

Could soften her sting

Or make her feel at home

Within the daisy-ring

She can do nothing with our critiques!

Arrogant, we, who believe she grew spikes just to spite us

We have forgotten what flowers are for;

That they are not for us

That they do not exist for our pleasure

And our admiration – or lack thereof – is a miserable measure

Of the design

We do not count her in our service

She is not amongst our arms

Nor even numbered to enlist

Stately-sharp her tongue is, and the truth she speaks is this:

We have not been granted the authority to dictate how she’s used 

Nor can we even grasp the scope of her mighty function from our view.

Her petals press

Between the pages of our language;

But she will not be trampled thus.

In truth, our dictionary has no merit.

Our plain and petty definitions

Are not hers to inherit.