Tales of Thorns

Hunched against twilight,
unfurling brambles and briars
arch with witch’s spite,
wiry black liars
that prickle and grasp.
Night noises regale
with twisted tales
of thorns, the cost is just
a drop of berry red blood
to satisfy suckering roots.
All is not lost.

Kim M. Russell, 27th July 2020

Tales of Thorns

My response to dVerse Poets Pub Quadrille: Among the Brambles

Linda is our host this Monday with the Quadrille. a poem of 44 words exactly, excluding the title. She has chosen a word she loves, ‘bramble’ as it ‘brings to mind days of old, slower days, easy days, days without a virus raging through humanity’, and she is taken back to her childhood, picking blackberries on hot and humid summer days. We pick blackberries here in the UK too, and we have plenty around our garden.

Linda has not only shared a quote from ‘Alphabet of Thorn, by Patricia A. McKillip, but also poems by Emily Dickinson and Christina Rossetti.

The word to use in our Quadrilles today is ‘bramble’ or any form thereof; we can even create our own words from it.

52 thoughts on “Tales of Thorns”

  1. This is incredibly captivating, Kim! 💝 I love the image of “Night noises regale with twisted tales of thorns.” 🙂 It sounds like a delicious new myth waiting to unravel.

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    1. All the original fairy tales are dark, just the way I like them. I can’t be bothered with Disney’s sweetened pap. Give me Grimm and Andersen!

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    1. You should have seen my husband’s arms when he’d finished clearing brambles from our garden, which is much bigger than we thought! Just the nettles to sort out and the painful bit will be over!

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      2. You’re dead right about nettles and butterflies, which have also taken a fancy to my potato plants, which is nice for me as they are outside my window!

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  8. Lovely, rife with internal and unique rhyming. As a picker of blackberries and a climber of thorn trees, I bear bramble scars proudly. They hurt like hell, but do fade away

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  10. This is quite the beauty! You sure had my attention while reading this piece. As said, it has a mysterious, evocative presence and it’s absolutely enthralling. It reminds me a bit of folklore and mythology with the witch details and the liar line. Amazing, amazing piece here. It’s lovely.

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  11. In Oregon, where my daughter lives, blackberries grow wild along roadsides. I thought it the most remarkable thing when I first visited there. Her first home in Salem had a huge blackberry bramble which the birds loved. Your words reminded me.

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  19. Great gothic write here. Agree with comment above – the original fairy tales are dark psychological mysteries where everything has a cost – and there’s more than a bit of this in this intriguing piece. Lovely read – thank you.

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