Gathering Fireweed by the Harbor
It’s me and the bees, usually. Sometimes, a grandchild
is running his small hands across the blossoms,
pulling flowers from the stalk. Willow-like leaves
we use for tea, pinnately veined, and deep fuchsia flowers,
seeded capsules, and later in summer—a tuft of fine
white hair tells us Fall is coming soon.
I know plants and places like a map of ocean and craggy
coastline drawn with a spell of this morning’s welcome—
a heron squawk, an eagle’s beckoning call
to the halibut carcass a fisherman has tossed overboard.
Here, between beach and forest, delight is an element
like fireweed and rain and I know how the world looks
and feels with me in it, pinching blossoms, inhaling slow-time.
I’d rather be here, hip-deep in tall grass next to a treeline
of mossy spruce than anywhere else in the world at this
moment, on this morning, swishing bees from rain-soaked
blossoms, saying Gunalchéesh and Excuse me.
Fireweed gifts. Fireweed love. Fireweed grows in disturbed
soil like this breakwater laid out to build the harbor
and the treacherous hillsides next to the highway.
Something beautiful appears where our island is always
sloughing off—mud and trees come down often lately,
rocks roll onto the highway. Soon, we will have fireweed,
horsetail, alder, and stink currant.
And we, like fireweed, have adapted to disturbances
like logging and windthrown forest, like the salmon
fishing closure, like the sawmill shut down.
Too many storms. Too warm sea. Too little salmon.
Fireweed growing strange, thick-stemmed, oddly bent,
double-headed.
Fireweed freezes for use all year long—make tea
with leaves, make jelly, make iced tea, and scones.
Long leafy stalks with reddish stems tower over
my head and I fill my cedar bark basket with
bright flowers. A bee buzzes in my blossom-filled
basket. I rescue the bee. I rescue me.
*Gunalchéesh is Lingít for thank you.
Vivian Faith Prescott was born and raised on a small island, Wrangell, Kaachxana.áak’w, in Southeast Alaska where she lives and writes at her family’s fishcamp on the land of the Shtax’heen Kwáan. Read more.