Ann Fisher-Wirth

I love the fecundity of North Mississippi, where we have lived for 36 years, but I can’t say I love the bamboo that the little boy who lived in the house next door some sixty years ago brought home one day from his 4-H club and planted in his yard. It ran amok, as bamboo does, and it has become my yearly nemesis, with runners that send up spikes each spring all through the hedges and across our yard. The house next door is now a Historical Preservation site, and though the city-appointed groundskeepers mow the grass with their roaring machines so close (even during a drought) that the dust flies, they don’t control the living bamboo or cut out the dead bamboo. Ah, well, it is good to be reminded that bamboo doesn’t care about my frustration. I salute its stubborn desire to go forth and multiply.

My other poem, “Val Corsaglia, Italian Piemonte,” celebrates a walk my husband and I took years ago with my daughter and her family in an exquisitely beautiful mountain valley in the Province of Cuneo. But braided together with my description of the walk is the list of nine impending or actual environmental disasters that Fred Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster describe, quoted from Swedish scientist Johan Rockström, in their 2011 book What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism. The poem ends with a reference to millefleurs, or “a thousand flowers,” the Renaissance style of painting or weaving many small flowers and plants, all different, against a background of grass. What a great way to express rapture and abundance. What a beautiful sense of holiness, symbolized by the newborn right at the heart of the plenteous natural world. That walk, that day, gave me that sense of holiness.