Coontie: zamia pumilla
Burn everything that’s green
every part of it that looks alive
it comes back lush—delicate
fronds arching from a stub of root.
Zamia means hurt. These ancient cycads
experts in damage, shared the Earth
with dinosaurs, hoarded starch
in underground stems, survived.
That starch is deadly, but the natives learned
(how did they do that? how many died?)
to leach the poison—boil, pound, grind,
lay it in the sun to dry
make meal for steaming bowls of sofkee,
good sweet loaves of bread.
Anne McCrary Sullivan is a Florida Master Naturalist, an avid canoeist, and author of three books about the Everglades: Ecology II: Throat Song from the Everglades, poems; Paddling the Everglades Wilderness Waterway, a guidebook; and most recently The Everglades: Stories of Grit and Spirit from the Mangrove Wilderness, narratives constructed from oral histories. Read more.
“Coontie: zamie pumilla” has been previously published in Ecology II: Throat Song from the Everglades (2009, WordTech Editions).