Val Corsaglia, Italian Piemonte
We walked away from the village of Corsaglia along a trail that led through lush,
Species loss
nearly impenetrable oak, hazelnut, and chestnut woods, past ancient stone houses
ocean acidification
and shepherds’ huts, beside a rushing stream. When we began to walk it was softly
ocean “dead zones”
raining. The rain soon stopped, but the mist and cool soft air remained. All over,
global freshwater crisis
wildflowers—buttercups, daisies, scabiosa with its purple tufts, Johnny jump-ups,
deforestation
button ferns, wild geraniums, wild strawberries. Once, when the river
consequent soil erosion
curved away, a meadow opened up to our left, and it was so richly flowering
colony collapse disorder
that I could only think of the millefleur foregrounds of medieval paintings,
fertilizers and herbicides, chemically toxic soil
the thousand small flowers springing up around the Christ child
ANN FISHER-WIRTH’s eighth book is Into the Chalice of Your Thoughts, a poetry/photography collaboration with Wilfried Raussert, with translations into Spanish by the Women in Translation group at U Wisconsin-Madison (U Guadalajara Press, 2023). Read more.