The Purple Pumpkin

The Purple Pumpkin

Waiting for the white paper
which underlies this writing
to loose a flow of words
finding Peace
in the facing-off:
a pumpkin and a purple cushion..
Henry David Thoreau chose
to sit on a solitary pumpkin
not a crowded purple cushion..
Many we know might charge him
with most slothful neglect..
Our venerable teachers 
have exhorted us to
lift up the purple
with their assumption:
what is real is purple..
Yet we..startled by experience
find that very often
purple is pain..
We long to sit on that pumpkin
long since overgrown
with dead purple vines..
At last in our longing
the pumpkin may speak
of what lies in hiding
.. 'til just now..
with Peace emerging
the Pumpkin is Purple...

"I would rather sit on a pumpkin, 
and have it all to myself, than be
crowded on a velvet cushion."
--Henry David Thoreau
Copyright © | Year Posted 2016

Poem

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Book: Diverse Voices: The Poetry of Human Rights and the Pursuit of Peace