War & Thistles

by Dee H. Wade

It is the conspiracy that lies beneath:
under each man-tall thistle, below the slice
of the plow,
vast reaches of rhizomes spread,
marked by subsoil buds that can each
one surface
and grow into an identical copy of its
big sister,
supplementing the promotion of her DNA
through seeds cast windward by
the thousands,
seeds that can last two decades in the soil
before the decision to germinate is made,
so that only
careful stewardship can slow her advance.
Nasty spines and prickles abound:
can you imagine what a mouth full of that
would do to the stomach of a heifer?

Yet bumblebees just love it, can’t get
enough of it,
and even we recognize thistles’ rough
and purpled beauty.
They symbolize well the gritty intransigence
of the Scots,
Depict the stick-to-it-tiveness of a proud
and plucky people.
But when their European varieties invade
our ground,
led by the deservedly designated import
Circium Vulgare,
they can ruin a pasture before you can
turn around,
or reduce a crop yield to zero in two
growing seasons.
A farmer swears he heard a clump of
thistle laugh
right after he sprayed it full in the face
with RoundUp
and that it was a foot higher when next he
crossed that field.

Only bumblebees escape from a patch of
them profitably.
You may not remember how you entered a
thistle thicket,
but you will note every rip and scrape on
the way out,
like waking up to an ill-considered war
of presumption,
trapped in a briary bramble of bad choices
because the martial spirit seems impossible
to eradicate, too,
and as long as we use evil to fight evil,
seeding more evil,
then no Balm in Gilead can soothe the sting
of such thorns and the tears of Rachel, the
inconsolable, flow.