The Daily Boost #533
O ye lover of nettles!
Poetry can come from anything. As can “the world’s sense.”
URTICOPHILIA Oh let me wake where nettles are growing in the cool first light of a spring morning the young leaves shining after a night’s rain a green radiance glistening through them as their roots rise into their day’s color a hue of sunlight out of the black earth they made with their roots in the underworld touching the darkness of their whole story from which their leaves open to the morning into a world they know and a season they inherit let me wake where nettles were always familiar and come and go in the conversation their growth this year compared with other years in the same places the way they sting if barely brushed but not if grasped firmly without hesitation the best recipe for nettle soup with new potatoes oh let the world’s sense come to me from the spring leaves of nettles my true elders and not from the voices with something to sell nor from the spreading scar tissue of pavement numbing the flayed earth not from the latest words of the fast-talkers to whom the nettle leaves never listen (from The Moon Before Morning)
(My thanks to the late W. S. Merwin, via the Merwin Conservancy.)
The Gentle Nudge
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