My Species
even
a small purple artichoke
boiled
in its own bittered
and darkening
waters
grows tender,
grows tender and sweet
patience, I think,
my species
keep testing the spiny leaves
the spiny heart
Notes
Where Walt Whitman’s Give Me the Splendid Silent Sun demanded an exuberant, totalizing banquet of light and sensory surplus, Jane Hirshfield’s My Species pulls our focus down to the slow, solitary boiling of a single spiny thistle simmering in its own darkening brine. The transformation of the bitter, armored heart into sweetness reveals how stubborn defense mechanisms yield only through sustained immersion in suffering—proving that the ego’s hard exterior softens not by avoiding heat, but by enduring the slow, patient labor of internal contradiction. It grounds August’s theme of Feast in the quiet art of culinary and existential endurance, reminding us that the deepest, most nourishing sweetness is only unlocked when we keep testing what once seemed guarded and unyielding. #poetry #janehirshfield #feast #august #artichoke