Three poems ------ Sigrun Susan Lane

                                                        

The Botanist

From the bus, she bird-walked

the narrow parking strips,

green Edens of wildness,

bent to pick the plants---

stalk, root and flowers

to be pressed between wax,

to be named from Ada Georgia’s Manual of Weeds.

Each specimen labeled, its seed splayed.

She gathered the unwanted,

the uninvited adventurers,

the wanderers, windswept weeds

from overgrown parking strips.

She called them by their common names

and by their Latinate, meadow butter cup, Ranuculus acris,

common chickweed, Stellaria media,

yarrow, Achillea Millefolium,

and mother’s heart, capsella Bursa-pastoris

which grows everywhere.

The pages she gathered

in black notebooks which grew fat

with weeds as she wandered farther

afield and returned triumphant,

her face flushed, her hat askew,

a clutch of bane in her hands.

She found them beautiful,

as she found beauty

in the uninvited and unexpected,

like the errant husband

everyone said should go

but stayed, like the five

children that filled

her noisy messy rooms.

                                                        Sigrun Susan

Crash

A logging crew got there first,

found the crumbled wreck.

They left in the pilot’s seat the body

of my father with his broken head,

behind him, my mother

with her last words whispered.

They lifted out the living man

and the living woman,

put them on solid ground,

relayed back for help

for survivors, ambulances

out of Port Angeles.

They heard this machine,

death roaring out of the sky,

destroying all before it---

trees toppled, limbs shirred

and scattered, then the crash---

wings torn off the plane,  

the plane half buried and smoking---

twisted metal wreckage.

This crew had seen bad luck,

a man pinned by a fallen snag,

a choke-chain unset,

a fall from a tree climb, but this—

That night driving home one logger

saw a vision of a plane hurtling down

at him, another dreamed he was the pilot,

another dreamed of falling over and over.

The hurt had cut its way into them,

as it did into tree bark, left it’s scars.

For what they witnessed at the site,

for what they saved,

for what they could not save,

for what they salvaged

and brought out,

Bless them.

Cathedral

I would rise and go there

to see the place

that swallowed them,

where their spirits entered.

Somewhere on that mountain side

stand witnesses- fir, cedar,

hemlock, among salal,

sword fern, gorse and granite.

I would go on foot to find them,

cut my way up through the brush,

listen for the silence

they found that final day.

I could not look before

at the place where the plane fell,

nosed its way to earth to rest,

wings torn from its dragonfly body.

I will not see scars on the trees-

by now the forest has claimed

and covered all. 

The undergrowth filled in---

chokeberry, brambles, fern. 

Wounds healed over, bark

thickened, but scars are deep

and burn under the skin.

But they’re not here.  Restless spirits,

they wait at the crest of the mountain,

or near the river’s mouth

where the stones are polished smooth,

and berries are sweet in the sun,

where the salmon run and the catch is good.