#poem, «Little Purple Trees»

Those Little Purple Trees
(Listening to Mozart’s Oboe Quartet K.370)

So they’ve discovered space and planets,
with telescopes and instruments that measure
even the slightest degrees of their absolute silence,
and they say it’s a void dark and eternal,
they call it the universe and say it’s empty.
But it isn’t, no, not at all.
In those places, that now we cannot see, there are forests,
not of oak or pine,
but of little purple trees whose leaves and branches
are whispering about the futility of their discoveries
and how they waste our time.

Little purple trees grow,
as do those imagined asteroids
that orbit moons and dance with icy comets,
and become the daring iconoclasts sipping tea in earthly gardens.

Astronomers deny them as they do not fit within their schemes,
which are filled with laws and theories like gravity.
They’ve convinced us there are things we’ve never seen, or ever will,
like light years and black holes in outer space,
but for purple trees, in their schemes there’s no place.

Little purple trees are a judgement against closed-minded reason,
existing just to mock outlandish theories,
with their tiny roots and purple shade
which they provide in every season…

They’re the essence of truth,
the more absurd, the more phenomenal,
precise, perfect, fantastic,
makes them more real than quantum calculations
and more meaningful than algebraic equations.

And when the day arrives and we sail through purple groves
in wooden ships smelling faintly of lilac,
we will know with certainty there is no space,
that we exist within a garden,
where nothing’s empty,
and we will see,
next to apple, olive, pear and orange,
little purple trees.

C.2025 – Francisco Bravo Cabrera – 20/30 SEP 2025 – Chios, Greece

CHEERS