Plant Calling
It’s not the plants calling, as I stoop,
twist their leaves to note their undersides.
I wasn’t a girl who dallied among them, speaking my dreams.
Both their silence & their rootedness, still foreign to me,
their bitterness never my friend.
Even the tang of the wood sorrel, its mini okras
the neighborhood kids showed me I could eat—
there was no pleasure in that sourness,
the dreadful way it turned my tongue.
But here I am, tasting it again,
imagining it crushed to lemonade. I let it have its way
in autumn pots.
Calendula, thyme, lemon balm—
I grew them, out of desperation. At this late stage
still seeking, not in verse, but here in green
that I can tear, eat, digesting what’s been around,
devalued, hardly seen.
I let in the plants, crack their sharpness with bright teeth,
welcome them with a tongue’s strength,
feel them slipping for the heart, as if to dissolve dividedness.
When I see the real-life herbalist drifting past,
I stay put. It’s not them, nor their worts that lure,
but this disoriented belief leading me
to what’s bound to earth.
I’ll boil the last leaves of sturdy green into a tea,
but the only power I believe will carry me,
is what wilds, fuels and stays until it fades.
Tara Bray is the author of Small Mothers of Fright (LSU Press, 2015) and Mistaken for Song (Persea Books, 2009). Read more.