Medicine Flower

"Medicine Flower"

chrys furrer

I don’t know how 

            to love a dying world. 

Moreover, 

            I don’t know how to love a living one. 

Is my love enough? I wonder 

            as I stretch it like fabric 

across a wounded stump.       

Is it enough, I wonder, 

as I offer my own fluidity, rain-like, 

            to a parched landscape. 

Marina, medicine woman, mentor – 

she taught me to always leave 

when taking, 

always leave something of yourself 

            in reciprocity: 

            hair, spit, tobacco. 

If you take a plant, 

            offer the land 

your soul. 

It just might give it back to you, 

            whole. 

I sit next to the last of the sticky monkey flower blooms 

and try to imagine a world without you, 

            future generations who will never know you 

futures that won’t exist 

unless we can palliate, 

unmake the mess we’ve made, 

and learn to love (w)holy the wounded world that is

Published in the Sierra Journal, 2022/23.