Elinor Ann Walker

For many seasons, I’ve observed moss carpeting the rocks by my pond in one of my favorite shades of green—then, I noticed something growing like tiny, pale trees from the moss itself. I used my camera to zoom in. Through the magnified lens, another forest materialized. I could see the spores. What would it be like to occupy that terrain? I realized I didn’t know much about moss morphology. These inquiries led me into both my poem and an entire moss-world. 

Plants often shift my perspective if I can forget about myself for a minute. Much of what takes me by surprise in our yard results from our benign (sometimes deliberate) neglect. Leaf litter abounds, and now I can see how well camouflaged the ground-feeding birds become in winter. As my mother got sicker, we let even more go, despite knowing that the taller the unsightly plants grew, the harder they’d be to pull up. That’s why the thistle towered right outside the screened porch where I couldn’t help but see it—and when it went to seed, where I watched the goldfinches feasting, late afternoon light flickering like their plumage, the thistle offerings themselves afloat. Grief has a way of shrinking the view and making words inadequate, but I drifted elsewhere for a little while that day on something other than my unanswered questions. That was the Carolina thistle’s unexpected gift.

We can’t help but be human-centered, but the more I pay attention, the more I realize how interconnected all creatures are, invisibly and otherwise. We must protect what we can. Sometimes a cosmos-waiting-to-happen is contained in but a filament. Moss and thistle regenerate by tiny spore and seed, propagate on nothing more (or less) than wind and feathered wings.