Tuesday, August 22, 2017

Be a dragonfly


photo by Louisa Edgerton



Be A Dragonfly

shaggy bog moss
we were looking for dragonflies
shaggy bog moss
we were listening to lichen
we were learning
to say goodbye as we
disappear, into the sky
violet dancer
still water
sunshine
two hawks, flying together.

gary lawless

Irish lichen poem

Map Lichen on Slievetooey

Up on this bare summit
where fierce weathers pare
heather and peat down
to its skeletal bone
until the cairns groan
like gods in labor
I check my route and
watch a hare white
in its winter coat sit
back in a gap of light
scanning a stone whose
lichen maps
worlds
unknown to me and
cartography.

Francis Harvey

lichen poem, lew welch

Springtime in the Rockies, lichen

All these years I overlooked them in the
racket of the rest, this
symbiotic splash of plant and fungus feeding
on rock, on sun, a little moisture, air -
tiny acid-factories dissolving
salt from living rocks and
eating them.

Here they are, blooming!
Trail rock, talus and scree, all dusted with it:
rust, ivory, brilliant yellow-green, and
cliffs like murals!
Huge panels streaked and patched, quietly
with shooting-stars and lupine at the base.

Closer, with a glass, a city of cups!
Clumps of mushrooms and where do the
plants begin? Why are they doing this?
In this big sky and all around me peaks &
the melting glaciers, why am I made to
kneel and peer at Tiny?

These are the stamps on the final envelope.

How can the poisons reach them?
In such thin air, how can they care for the
loss of a million breaths?
What, possibly, could make their ground more bare?

Let it all die.
The hushed globe will wait and wait for
what is now so small and slow to
open it again.

As now, indeed, it opens again, this
scentless velvet,
crumbler-of-the-rocks,

this Lichen!


Lew Welch