Tuesday Poem: After a Long Hiatus, Luna Returns

Luna’s Trues

Hide your potables, put ups,

self-growns, and happy tools

whenever they’re not in hand.

Whatever home you make must be

up high on a hill, or stilt built, or tree

supported to withstand the waters’ comings.

Always carry a knife and a bag for forage

you stumble upon. Pass it by, it will surely

end up in the bag of who’s behind you.

Barter as much as you can,

for trade is a two handed benefit.

Be wary of poison places. Even a tread-by

can leave you weakened and sickly.

Take to a cave or a dug out place, if there’s to be

spiral winds and or close in lightning.

Never eat what grows near the engulfments.

Learn everything you can from the animal folk.

The ones, that are left, be little survivors.

A body only needs one bit of food a day.

Eat what can’t be salted or dried up first.

Waste nil. Eat what’s there even if

it makes your belly hurt

Most things got a repurpose. Our job to find it.

Trade what you can’t use. Discard nought.

Salvage what you can from every wreck.

It’s a gift from the hand of the dead.

Grow what you can, when you can, where you can.

Greenhouse an old car, or chicken coop it.

Dirt-full planters make good insulation.

Grasses love a roof, and so do edible mosses.

Rainwater is a gift and it must be treasured.

Fouling the water is poisoning yourself.

Bug bread tastes best with salty 
seaweed soup or juicy mushrooms.

Feed a stranger just enough to give them 
the strength to move on.

Do not allow strangers into your nest.

In the conurbations, 
you’re no more than a field mouse.

Beware. Traps been set for you everywhere.

Most of what’s people-made will 
degrade the air if you burn it.

What weather delivers comes straight 
from the heart of the earth.

 

Tuesday Poem: From The Water Series

Snowdrop Soup

is what Luna serves him.

She forages and all she can

find is these, with their little

white heads and greeny secrets.

Months of being cooped up

in their too tiny space,

inundated with snow, after

heavy wet ice, after hailstone

and rain, wind whipping

beneath the floorboards, stilts

rattling a rough tattoo.

There were shriveled carrots

and mildewed beets left,

to throw in with a brackish

draw from the well, her

put-ups all but decimated.

She spies them at her feet,

clusters of early March milk maids,

a first flowering, stoop-shouldered

and shy above the sooty patches of melt.

A gift, she thinks, from the angels,

for ain’t she like Eve almost? Needing

a little swig of the hope, after

losing so much that was good?

Too late she remembers their other name:

death’s flower, so beautiful were they,

once she clipped them, like mermaid’s

hair drifting across the bowl.

He gobbled them fast, and she did too,

so craving of green were they, and then

the cramps and the stomach flips set in,

the two of them dizzy as love sick fools.

Giddy, he says, with spring just round the bend.

Their guts will mend, since at least she

remembered to leave bulb in the ground.

She doesn’t tell him the story. Maybe

next year. Pictures how hard their

empty bellies will shake when they laugh.