3UDC: 008; 502/504
DOI 10.24412/2713-184x-2024-1-68-74
POEMS ABOUT PLANTS AND FUNGI
The new section of our journal, "Poetic Anthology of Eco-Human Experience", presents poetry, which reflects the human connections with the natural world. In this issue we offer a selection of poems dedicated to plants and fungi, written by poets of the 20th — early 21st centuries, allowing us to see the eco-human, ecopoietic dimensions of these relationships, and human ability to generate new meanings and forms of experience through interaction with these forms of life. We invite readers to contribute to this selection of poems. Please feel free to send us poems on plants and fungi that you find relevant.
Robert Frost (1874-1963), is one of the most celebrated figures in American poetry, the author of numerous poetry collections on universal themes infused with psychological complexity and layers of ambiguity and irony.
The Sound of the Trees
I wonder about the trees.
Why do we wish to bear
Forever the noise of these
More than another noise
So close to our dwelling place?
We suffer them by the day
Till we lose all measure of pace,
And fixity in our joys,
And acquire a listening air.
They are that that talks of going
But never gets away;
And that talks no less for knowing,
As it grows wiser and older,
That now it means to stay.
My feet tug at the floor
And my head sways to my shoulder
Sometimes when I watch trees sway,
From the window or the door.
I shall set forth for somewhere,
I shall make the reckless choice
Some day when they are in voice
And tossing so as to scare
The white clouds over them on.
I shall have less to say,
But I shall be gone.
Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-1941) was a Russian poet, whose work is considered among some of the greatest in twentieth century Russian literature. As a lyrical poet, her passion and daring linguistic experimentation mark her as a striking chronicler of her times and the depths of the human condition.
Insomnia. 7. In the pine-tree, tenderly tenderly...
In the pine-tree, tenderly tenderly, finely finely: something hissed. It is a child with black eyes that I see in my sleep.
From the fair pine-trees hot resin drips, and in this splendid night there are saw-teeth going over my heart.
Denise Levertov (1923-1997), though Denise Levertov was born in England, she became known as one of the great American poets and became an important voice in the American avant-garde. Levertov went on to publish more than twenty volumes of poetry, including The Freeing of the Dust (1975), which won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize.
In California During the Gulf War
Among the blight-killed eucalypts, among
trees and bushes rusted by Christmas frosts,
the yards and hillsides exhausted by five years of drought,
certain airy white blossoms punctually
reappeared, and dense clusters of pale pink, dark pink—
a delicate abundance. They seemed
like guests arriving joyfully on the accustomed festival day, unaware of the year's events, not perceiving the sackcloth others were wearing.
To some of us, the dejected landscape consorted well with our shame and bitterness. Skies ever-blue, daily sunshine, disgusted us like smile-buttons.
Yet the blossoms, clinging to thin branches more lightly than birds alert for flight, lifted the sunken heart
even against its will.
But not
as symbols of hope: they were flimsy as our resistance to the crimes committed
—again, again—in our name; and yes, they return, year after year, and yes, they briefly shone with serene joy over against the dark glare
of evil days. They are, and their presence is quietness ineffable—and the bombings are, were, no doubt will be; that quiet, that huge cacophony
simultaneous. No promise was being accorded, the blossoms were not doves, there was no rainbow. And when it was claimed the war had ended, it had not ended.
Vladimir Soloukhin (1924-1997) was a Russian poet and writer. The main theme of Soloukhin's work is the Russian countryside, its present and future. He was considered to be a leading figure of the "village prose" group of writers.
The Birch
In fir plantation all is dreary, The tone is muted and subdued. A silver birch's flash shines cheery Alone among the firs that brood.
For people, death's less complicated. I saw myself an hour ago, In distant grove, when agitated, Birch started cheerful autumn show.
And here her leaves she now is shedding, From other birches tucked away. In hazy covert, blaze is spreading, A hundred paces' golden spray.
And dreary firs uncomprehending Still closer in upon her crowd: We both were verdant skywards trending A while ago. Why's she so proud?
And so, the serious firs stand thinking As if they're lowering gaze to ground. For dying birch that now is shrinking They vigil keep without a sound.
Robert Hass (1941 -), his books of poetry include The Apple Trees at Olema: New and Selected Poems (2010); Time and Materials (2007), which won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize; Sun Under Wood: New Poems (1996), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award; Human Wishes (1989); Praise (1979), which won the William Carlos Williams Award; and Field Guide (1973), which was selected by Stanley Kunitz for the Yale Younger Poets Series. He received the 2014 Wallace Stevens Award for proven mastery in the art of poetry by the Academy of American Poets. He is a distinguished professor in poetry and poetics at the University of California, Berkeley.
The Apple Trees at Olema
They are walking in the woods along the coast
and in a grassy meadow, wasting, they come upon
two old neglected apple trees. Moss thickened
every bough and the wood of the limbs looked rotten
but the trees were wild with blossom and a green fire
of small new leaves flickered even on the deadest branches.
Blue-eyes, poppies, a scattering of lupine
flecked the meadow, and an intricate, leopard-spotted
leaf-green flower whose name they didn't know.
Trout lily, he said; she said, adder's-tongue.
She is shaken by the raw, white, backlit flaring
of the apple blossoms. He is exultant,
as if some things he felt were verified,
and looks to her to mirror his response.
If it is afternoon, a thin moon of my own dismay
fades like a scar in the sky to the east of them.
He could be knocking wildly at a closed door
in a dream. She thinks, meanwhile, that moss
resembles seaweed drying lightly on a dock.
Torn flesh, it was the repetitive torn flesh
of appetite in the cold white blossoms
that had startled her. Now they seem tender
and where she was repelled, she takes the measure
of the trees and lets them in. But he no longer
has the apple trees. This is as sad or happy
as the tide, going out or coming in, at sunset.
The light catching in the spray that spumes up
on the reef is the color of the lesser finch
they notice now flashing dull gold in the light
above the field. They admire the bird together,
it draws them closer, and they start to walk again.
A small boy wanders corridors of a hotel that way.
Behind one door, a maid. Behind another one, a man
in striped pajamas shaving. He holds the number
of his room close to the center of his mind
gravely and delicately, as if it were the key,
and then he wanders among strangers all he wants.
Dorianne Laux (1952 -), the author of several collections of poetry. She was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2020. Among her awards are a Pushcart Prize, an Editor's Choice III Award, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her poems have been translated into French, Italian, Korean, Romanian, Afrikaans, Dutch, and Brazilian Portuguese.
The Life of Trees
The pines rub their great noise
into the spangled dark, scratch
their itchy boughs against the house,
that moan's mystery translates roughly
into drudgery of ownership: time
to drag the ladder from the shed,
climb onto the roof with a saw
between my teeth, cut
those suckers down. What's reality
if not a long exhaustive cringe
from the blade, the teeth. I want to sleep
and dream the life of trees, beings
from the muted world who care
nothing for Money, Politics, Power, Will or Right,
who want little from the night
but a few dead stars going dim, a white owl
lifting from their limbs, who want only
to sink their roots into the wet ground
and terrify the worms or shake
their bleary heads like fashion models
or old hippies. If trees could speak,
they wouldn't, only hum some low
green note, roll their pinecones
down the empty streets and blame it,
with a shrug, on the cold wind.
During the day they sleep inside
their furry bark, clouds shredding
like ancient lace above their crowns.
Sun. Rain. Snow. Wind. They fear
nothing but the Hurricane, and Fire,
that whipped bully who rises up
and becomes his own dead father.
In the storms the young ones
bend and bend and the old know
they may not make it, go down
with the power lines sparking,
broken at the trunk. They fling
their branches, forked sacrifice
to the beaten earth. They do not pray.
If they make a sound, it's eaten
by the wind. And though the stars
return they do not offer thanks, only
ooze a sticky sap from their roundish
concentric wounds, clap the water
from their needles, straighten their spines
and breathe, and breathe again.
Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) was an American poet. Little-known during her life, she has since been regarded as one of the most important figures in American poetry Although much of the early reception concentrated on Dickinson's eccentric and secluded nature, she has become widely acknowledged as an innovative, proto-modernist poet The world of nature and plant life, in particular, were significant themes in her poetry. Dickinson's herbarium, which is now held at Harvard University, was published in 2006 as Emily Dickinson's Herbarium. The original work was compiled by Dickinson during her years at Amherst Academy, and consists of 424 pressed specimens of plants arranged on 66 pages of a bound album
The Mushroom is the Elf of Plants
The Mushroom is the Elf of Plants — At Evening, it is not At Morning, in a Truffled Hut It stops upon a Spot
As if it tarried always And yet it's whole Career Is shorter than a Snake's Delay — And fleeter than a Tare —
'Tis Vegetation's Juggler — The Germ of Alibi — Doth like a Bubble antedate And like a Bubble, hie —
I feel as if the Grass was pleased To have it intermit — This surreptitious Scion Of Summer's circumspect.
Had Nature any supple Face Or could she one contemn — Had Nature an Apostate — That Mushroom— it is Him!
Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) is credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry and is best known for two of her published collections, The Colossus and Other Poems (1960) and Ariel (1965), and also The Bell Jar, a semi-autobiographical novel published shortly before her suicide in 1963. The Collected Poems was published in 1981, which included previously unpublished works. For this collection Plath was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 1982, making her the fourth to receive this honour posthumously
Mushrooms
Overnight, very Whitely, discreetly, Very quietly
Our toes, our noses Take hold on the loam, Acquire the air.
Nobody sees us,
Stops us, betrays us;
The small grains make room.
Soft fists insist on Heaving the needles, The leafy bedding,
Even the paving. Our hammers, our rams, Earless and eyeless,
Perfectly voiceless, Widen the crannies, Shoulder through holes. We
Diet on water, On crumbs of shadow, Bland-mannered, asking
Little or nothing. So many of us! So many of us!
We are shelves, we are Tables, we are meek, We are edible,
Nudgers and shovers In spite of ourselves. Our kind multiplies:
We shall by morning Inherit the earth. Our foot's in the door.
