Today I read the description
of a medicinal plant
in a seventeenth-century herbal.
The words,
in intimate detail,
described Potentilla
and how the author used it to heal
long, long ago.
After I closed the book
and shut out the strange, time-distorted vocabulary
I took my staff,
and walked the fields
surrounding my home.
I do not know why I paused
and looked down
to see the same Potentilla
three hundred years later.
The description from the book,
like an insubstantial shadow in my mind,
arranged itself
over the five jagged fingers of Potentilla's leaves,
his straggly stem,
swaying yellow flowers,
and clicked into place.
Wind,
blowing down
a million years of plant medicine
brushed against me.
I flickered and was gone,
insubstantial shadow in the mind of Earth.
And for a moment
I was an old herbalist in 1720,
brushing back my cloak with my hand
as I bent to look
at a plant
that Hippocrates had used
2000 years before me. |
|
|
