Poetry Friday: Moss

I’ve been appreciating moss on our walks in the woods. These images show such a variety of textures and shades. They remind me that sometimes beautiful things grow in quiet, dormant seasons.

Bruce Guernsey appreciates it too, in his poem “Moss”:

How must it be
to be moss,
that slipcover of rocks?—
imagine,

greening in the dark,
longing for north,
the silence
of birds gone south…

The rest is here.

Guernsey concludes with an allusion to moss adorning our gravestones,

where light fails,
where the chisel
cut the name.

Moss outlasts us, he seems to say.

It’s one of many things we can walk past without noticing, or recognize as yet another sign of the complexity and economy of nature. I tend to see it not as a reminder of death, but as a visual confirmation of life that grows even in the season when most vegetation has died back into the ground. It always cheers my eye.

Anna Botsford Comstock writes,

The Mosses are a special delight to children because they are green and beautiful before other plants have gained their greenness in the spring and after they have lost it in the fall; to the discerning eye, a mossy bank or a mossy log is a thing of beauty always. When we were children we regarded moss as a forest for fairy folk, each moss stem being a tree, and we naturally concluded that fairy forests were evergreen.

I didn’t imagine fairies as a child, but I did imagine tiny animals living in the moss forests.

Here’s to moss-gathering of all kinds! Click the button to visit the Poetry Friday roundup, and have a great weekend.