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Coda
Mark Irwin
That we’ve gone as far as we could discover, and here’s
where the last road ends, but another one’s just visible, and here’s
a kid spitting off a waterfall, and there’s another lighting a match
in the desert, then staring toward the sun, and what the children
playing in every subdivision say is just an echo of the green,
while in cities among concrete and machines, still the chlorophyll
shouts of trees, something to believe in, echo of the first
protozoa and the pain we feel that once there was a fruit
torn from each of our bodies, some human plan till we become
foreign to moss growing at the furling lip of a stream where no one
goes to find it, and when our children grow old, they’ll fold
the houses up and stack them on the lawn, the grass I mean that only
grows around large stones, and one day our sweet desires will all
be packed with dirt and we will travel far by keeping still.
Read two more poems by Mark Irwin in Terrain.org.
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Collecting—the parsing of the desired, known or not, from the undesired—lies at the heart of my scientific discipline, botany.
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Maryland’s Montgomery County Agricultural Reserve comprises 93,000 contiguous acres in the Washington, D.C. metro region set aside for farming and wildlife habitat.
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Lichens, mosses, ferns, fungi: all produce organic structures that speak of the passage of time and the changing landscape over which we humans have much responsibility.
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