And now as the iron rinds over <br />the ponds start dissolving, <br />you come, dreaming of ferns and flowers <br />and new leaves unfolding, <br />upon the brash <br />turnip-hearted skunk cabbage <br />slinging its bunches leaves up <br />through the chilling mud. <br />You kneel beside it. The smell <br />is lurid and flows out in the most <br />unabashed way, attracting <br />into itself a continual spattering <br />of protein. Appalling its rough <br />green caves, and the thought <br />of the thick root nested below, stubborn <br />and powerful as instinct! <br />But these are the woods you love, <br />where the secret name <br />of every death is life again - a miracle <br />wrought surely not of mere turning <br />but of dense and scalding reenactment. Not <br />tenderness, not longing, but daring and brawn <br />pull down the frozen waterfall, the past. <br />Ferns, leaves, flowers, the last subtle <br />refinements, elegant and easeful, wait <br />to rise and flourish. <br />What blazes the trail is not necessarily pretty.<br /><br />Mary Oliver<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/skunk-cabbage/
