Cockspur Bush
Cockspur Bush - meaning Summary
Resilient Life Cycle of Bush
The poem gives voice to a cockspur bush that narrates its life and death as continuous, intertwined processes. It registers being grazed, pruned, fruiting and reseeding while hosting birds, insects and predators. Images of multiplication, thorny protection, and reuse of flesh and dung emphasize resilience and ecosystem reciprocity. The speaker frames living and dying as reciprocal, cyclical acts that sustain both the plant and its surrounding life.
Read Complete AnalysesI am lived. I am died. I was two-leafed three times, and grazed, but then I was stemmed and multiplied, sharp-thorned and caned, nested and raised, earth-salt by sun-sugar. I was innerly sung by thrushes who need fear no eyed skin thing. Finched, ant-run, flowered, I am given the years in now fewer berries, now more of sling out over directions of luscious dung. Of water crankshaft, of gases the gears my shape is cattle-pruned to a crown spread sprung above the starve-gut instinct to make prairies of everywhere. My thorns are stuck with caries of mice and rank lizards by the butcher bird. Inches in, baby seed-screamers get supplied. I am lived and died in, vine woven, multiplied.
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