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.

rogersMoss2.jpg

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.

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