The Moss Method
Most lie low, flourishing with damp,
harvesting sunlight, no commotion, mosses
mouse-silent even through wind and hail,
stoic through motors roaring fumes,
through fat-clawed bears grubbing.
They can soothe the knife-edges of stones
with frothy leaf by leaf of gray/green life,
and burned-ground mosses can cover
destruction, charred stumps, trees felled
and blackened. Cosmopolitan mosses likewise
salve sidewalk cracks, crumbling walls.
Mosses root in thin alpine air, on sedentary
sand dunes, cling to cliff seeps beneath
spilling springs. For rest, they make mats
on streamside banks, for pleasure produce silky
tufts, wavy brooms of themselves in woodlands
for beauty, red roof moss for whim, elf
cap, haircap, sphagnum for nurturing.
No fossil record of note, no bone
history, so lenient they possess only
those memories remembered.
I believe they could comfort the world
with their ministries. That is my hope,
even though this world be a jagged rock,
even though this rock be an icy berg of blue
or a mirage of summer misunderstood
(moss balm for misunderstanding),
even though this world be blind and awry
and adrift, scattering souls like spores
through the deep of a starlit sea.
Pattiann Rogers has published fourteen books of poetry, most recently Quickening Fields from Penguin/Random House, 2017. Read more.
“The Moss Method” was previously published in Quickening Fields by Penguin Group, 2017. Reprinted by permission of the author.