A journal of art + literature engaging with nature, culture, the environment & ecology

She (who) gathers mushrooms

Gwendolyn Morgan, The Pacific Northwest

 

When the sun rose above

the cascade peaks

she laced her hiking boots, retraced

her steps like Raven following rain clouds

she knows the names of ink cap

blue chanterelle, black morel, 

the understory

the forest floor

illuminates her path

to perceive the natural world

through traditional ways of being

elemental knowing     leaf detritus

the forest lessons of ash leaves, white fir needles

mouse-tail moss, lichens, new territory of rhizomes

she wishes the children in the shelter, in the cages

could taste the sweet licorice root

touch yellow-green mosses

place rings of bracken ferns around 

small brown earth hands.

 

She walks into this territory underground

ancestral land     emergent layers, dense canopy

enormous mushroom shaped crowns

thousands of persons without homes now

she knows they will be wandering

seeking home for decades

if they survive as she has survived so far

guessing the names of other plants

her grandmother pointed out the ones you could eat

the ones to avoid like immigration officers 

skulking in the shadows         others waiting to evict

the wild ones, tented beneath Douglas Fir

her boots leave clear tracks

in the places where the latest news 

dampens her hopes     as she remembers

light a candle of invocation

change consciousness

like a chalice of golden chanterelles; 

may courage sustain us all.

 

 

 

 

Gwendolyn Morgan is a Pacific Northwest poet and artist who serves in interfaith Spiritual Care in a medical center. She learned the names of birds and inherited horse hair paint brushes and wooden paint boxes from her grandmothers. The Clark County Poet Laureate 2018-2020 in Washington State, her third book of poetry, Before the Sun Rises is a Nautilus Silver Winner in Poetry. Gwendolyn and her spouse Judy A. Rose focused on poetry and music during a Winter 2020 Centrum Artist Residency. As a multiracial family in a multispecies watershed, they are committed to equity work and inclusion for all.

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