Tara Hollander

Thistles are plants your bare toes avoid when you leave the soft dirt of the garden and hop the fence into wild grass. If you step on their prickles, you’ll be left picking out barbed edge splinters. However, as the poem in PHQ describes, thistles have become my symbol of hope.

When hope is under threat, you look to the future, to a time when worries have been laid to rest. The survival of our planet is not secure; we are not headed towards rest. In this poem, I face the worst of it, the imagined future of our path. My philosophical steps have been guided by Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, which lays out the Seventh Fire prophecy of two roads. One road appears smooth but leads to jagged glass and insufferable heat just over the horizon. The other a grassy path to walk barefoot on. You want to walk barefoot, I want to walk barefoot, but this is not an individual decision, and climate change pulls us towards destruction. 

I wrote this poem in the weeks following the 2025 presidential inauguration, amidst grief for marginalized communities and the one place I’ve always been able to find peace: nature. Helplessness has become a close friend in the past few months of grieving. Kimmerer tells us grief is necessary, healthy, but ultimately, not enough. She urges us to choose joy over despair. And so, what was once just a weed to me became something more. In “Thistles at the Fork,” we can face loss, focus our eyes to the final thistle, and choose a bit of joy.