Resurrection Fern

RESURRECTION FERN

Found after the new wine of rains
Woolly fern will be a healing flush
A whitish-green fronded message
In a flourish below rocks of pulpit hills
A soft-seeming leaf of green balm
Which blunts the edges of savagery
Like a fruitful oasis trill in a desert
Waving fronds as if Hosanna palms.

But stoke it with hard-spirited thirst
Mock it with elemental mean rejection
Scourge it with many canes of the sun
And the whips of red-hot angry winds
Condemn it to your parched rejection
Expose it to the want of human mobs
Nail it with annihilation and crucify it
Under the crack of thorns, and it dies.

Or seems so very completely to die.
Withering into hollow tombs of stone
Its limpness shrivels to a rigor mortis,
Curling up its toes its fingers its fronds
And rolling over on its back like a bird
Of dried up feather, a crackling corpse
Of what it was, a dried-up skeleton
A thing inconsequential to quick life.

And then a night of wet season rains
Soaking rains, continuous dampening
Rains. A dead bird begins a slouching,
Roll over, and the furled-up tendrils
Unfurl slowly, unfurl again like growth,
A growth already grown and then lost.
The dead woolly fern comes up green again
A Resurrection Fern returned to life.