Foraging
Pluck purslane and plantain for salad,
shred it small so it slides by skeptics,
know you’re kneeling in Eden even if
your rural township is loud with campaign signs,
target shooting, giant crop spraying tractors.
Focus on birdsong, nod at mallow flowers, breathe
in milkweed’s perfume. It might be cottagecore if
you wore a pinafore replete with harvesting pockets,
if you carried a handwoven basket, if blackberry
thorns didn’t snag your skin, if your fingernails
weren’t lined with soil. The ground fairly
hums with life and all you have to do is bend low
as worshippers do, choose and thank and pluck,
grateful to envision who you might feed and how
their bodies will savor wild-made nutrients
from the ground where you stand.
Small Mortals
“The universe is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects.”
~Thomas Berry
I reach 60 mph before noticing a spider
clinging to the windshield wiper with heroic tenacity
so I slow, pull off the road, let it climb my hand
to free on a nearby plant, aware drivers going by
see a woman crouched just beyond her blinking car
talking to a bush as if it might flare with revelations.
Sharing that story lets loose my family’s tales of helping turtles
across side streets, moving roadkill off the road to spare vultures,
tending injured birds till they could fly free, and those beautiful
skunks raising a family each year under our porch. Oh, and
sightings of Prudence the helpful house centipede who,
by her size, is likely three or more years old already.
If a supernova exploded in our galactic neighborhood, say
closer than 25 light years, our telescopes would show
only a distant twinkling star until, suddenly, all life on Earth
burned away. Everything we small mortals do defies our cosmic
insignificance. In this celestial dance of expansion and contraction,
death and rebirth, we’re all in this together.
*
Learn more about Laura on the Contributors page.
Laura’s latest collection, Portals (2020), was published by Middle Creek Press and is available here.
(Photo: Matthew Enger/flickr.com/ CC BY 2.0)
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