Sunday, June 29, 2025

Moss-Gathering

 

To loosen with all ten fingers held wide and limber
And lift up a patch, dark-green, the kind for lining cemetery baskets,
Thick and cushiony, like an old-fashioned doormat, 
The crumbling small hollow sticks on the underside mixed with roots, 
And wintergreen berries and leaves still stuck to the top, —
That was moss-gathering. 
But something always went out of me when I dug loose those carpets 
Of green, or plunged to my elbows in the spongy yellowish moss of the marshes:
And afterwards I always felt mean, jogging back over the logging road, 
As if I had broken the natural order of things in that swampland;
Disturbed some rhythm, old and of vast importance,
By pulling off flesh from the living planet;
As if I had committed, against the whole scheme of life, a desecration. 

-- Theodore Roethke

[Photo: moss in my garden].




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