Rank Roots; acanthus

(or Rankled Roots )

Under the old red cherry plums old acanthus plants keep
growing next to thread belts of NZ ‘Settler's’ Flax, as if
to decry this life: a sort of bear's breeches with deep fingers
falling to white fleshy roots off our introduced Caucasian radix.

The word-root is as spiced with buried forerunners
as our garden was at odd times with radishes;
as I now quest back to grimaced tastebuds of childhood
to eradicate ills in radical investigativeness.

It is always a chore to unearth the truth
of things firmly rooted to their source
for the sorrow and trouble of life
gives spiritual diseases a force.

What might seem lazy to the battlers -who often
in emotional sloth make a virtue of physical work
is really the hardest of tasks, - to get to
the bottom of our story - no delve can be shirked.

Now this is my one Classic, para-Homeric, allusion:
this leaf of the weedy old sinner, sap-stinking acanthus;
once was a pattern bound for glory, on civilized stone,
still found on capitals of carved columns in Corinth.

Corinthians we knew on the farm from the first and second
letters of Paul, while the pagan Greeks of ‘literati biblios’
were unsung among us, we had them in black books as hellions,
if we heard of them, who read Paul mostly out of all the Bible.

Though Paul was read for cut and thrust, it's gets ugly
there was no passion for the graced wisdom of past kind
for eye has not seen the beauty, nor has ear heard,
nor has it dawned on a set-sun of sheer mind

what God has prepared for those who love him,
even old acanthus, as it was known in the godtypes
of creation, like a spreading open hand-form in the maze
where the One touching base slowly redeems us of gripes

because his Spirit probes everything,
it is radically odd
digging up stuff,
even the depths of God,

the whole language of suffering
rooted in the wood of cross
is still nonsense to those that can't see
the bush from the bush where they are lost.

As teens, I tried to dig out the blind plant,
to consign acanthus to History
but the roots spread all over the place
like cancerous lymph nodes of a body

much as I and brothers removed joints,
rooted flesh out of our ground,
acanthus regrew, sprouted leaves
off tiny white rootfingers, we found

it might need years of pain,
perseverance and then a lucky grace
to get all the bits, each root
would grow, to tell every trace.

So the acanthus is still there, a dark life,
as if it thrives on ignorance and neglect;
So vigorous, with deep hands of vegetative fingers,
that it’s meaning, like its heart, is hard to detect.

When once-unfashionable acanthus came back in,
-the fashion- for no-maintenance had popularity
for pleasure gardens, and in park showpieces -
people decided to plant acanthus again in their city

Then I dug acanthus out of a rented place on the Yarra
to homegrow carrots as an alternative feature
and sold an awkward trailerload of cropped roots wholesale
to my childhood Sunday-School nurseryman-teacher.

And he sold them, like temptation, to the impulse-fingered
motif-consumer ease-buys of the unflagging Melbourne lot,
by the ten-thousands, - the roots subdivided into plantlets
In Coles department stores, in racks of leafy plastic pots.

12 December 1996 © Wayne David Knoll