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Beauty is the sole legitimate province of the poem.-Edgar Allan Poe

Poetry is when emotion has found its thought and thought has found words--Robert Frost

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance--Carl Sandburg

I have nothing to say, I am saying it, and that is poetry--John Cage

You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some of it with you--Joseph Joubert

Poetry is what in a poem makes you laugh, cry, prickle, be silent, makes your toe nails twinkle, makes you want to do this or that or nothing, makes you know that you are alone in the unknown world, that your bliss and suffering is forever shared and forever all your own. ~Dylan Thomas

joybragi84
Aug 17, 20222 min read

The Good Mushroom: A Request


You folks remember a while back--a long time back--I said that I would do requests for poems. I have had two requests. Kellie's sister Diane requested a poem about cardinals, so I did The Third Cardinal Sin. Now, Kellie has asked me for a poem about mushrooms. It is below.


All four of the mushroom photos here are courtesy of Kellie. She took the pictures when we went on the hiking expedition to Greer Spring on August 13. I chose the four images that best seem to fit with the poem.


Anyway, I have not rescinded my offer to write poems upon request. You are welcome to ask. I may not honor a request, but I will let you know why if I can't do it. For instance, I doubt that I could do it if someone asked, "Write a poem about your grandma." I would say, "Nope, I don't write poems about real individuals." I can do fictional characters, but I would never attempt to do a word portrait of a real person.


One more picture of a mushroom and then the poem follows. Enjoy!


The Good Mushroom


I am not a sun-lover.

But, what can I say?

I spend nights in the dark

And my days swathed in gray.

Don’t pity me though.

I prefer it that way.


I am a fungus fruit.

My mycelium weaves

Its threads through loose soil

And composting leaves.

I will only sprout when

The network believes


We are ready to spread

On the ripe forest floor.

Then, I pop up my cap

And I respire my spore,

Smoke-like in the air,

From each gill and each pore.


Not much like a flower

Though my stint is as brief,

My stalk is not shared

With a limb or a leaf,

And I know I’m no beauty.

That’s just not my belief.


I am sober not needy.

I do not tempt the bees

To sip on my insides

Or powder their knees

With promiscuous pollen.

My spores make their own breeze.


I am healthful or deadly.

I don’t quite have that down.

Take a look at my gills.

Are they white, tan, or brown?

The darker, the better,

Pale is like a cross bone,

And when my cap’s red,

Best to leave me ALONE.


Yes, alone in the shade

On the forest’s moist floor,

Where I’ll stand solemnly

For three days or more,

Then, I’ll fall and be done.

What’s a good mushroom for?


Comments

I find that I cannot exist without Poetry--without eternal poetry--half the day will not do--the whole of it--I began with a little, but habit has made me a Leviathan.-John Keats

We do not quite say that the new is more valuable because it fits in; but its fitting in is a test of its value.-T. S. Eliot

A man may praise and praise, but no one recollects but that which pleases.-George Gordon, Lord Byron

The great beauty of poetry is that it makes everything in every place interesting.-John Keats

Our faulty elder poets sacrificed the passion and passionate flow of poetry to the subtleties of intellect and to the stars of wit; the moderns to the glare and glitter of a perpetual, yet broken and heterogeneous imagery, or rather to an amphibious something, made up, half of image, and half of abstract meaning. The one sacrificed the heart to the head; the other both heart and head to point and drapery.-S. T. Coleridge

The purpose of rhythm, it has always seemed to me, is to prolong the moment of contemplation, the moment when we are both asleep and awake, which is the one moment of creation.-W. B. Yeats

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