The Bramble in the Road
Poem★★★★Once, so the legend goes, a bramble began to grow in the middle of a road. No one bothered to pull it up, for it didn’t take up much room. When it got bigger, people simply stepped out of the way, for they knew that they might get a sharp prick if they tramped on it.
At last the bramble had grown so large and had put down such deep roots that no one could pull it up. The roots were so firm that the plant grew up again every time it was hewed down. Finally, the only thing to be done was to graft a rose onto the bramble so that it could come to serve a good purpose, by giving pleasure with its beauty.
We may feel that the world today is a lot like the bramble. Its evils have grown so unobtrusively that we never noticed them until it was almost too late. Through warfare we tried to destroy the evils. But merely to destroy is not enough.
To achieve a better world from the old we must graft the flower of a better future on the living roots of the past.
The point
An unchecked bramble grows until destruction becomes necessary; merely destroying it fails because roots remain; the solution is grafting a rose onto the bramble—transforming evil's deep roots by grafting beauty.