Fissidens

This poem was originally published as a Poem Flyer.

Where humans flail and gasp, moss waits, withdraws.

Its colour who knows where, it crazes walls

With memories of lushness. At a prod,

It straggles into scraps that drift away

To join the world’s detritus. Come the rain,

Its tiny cosmos plumps and greens again

And carries on. It colonises stone;

If others follow, that’s not its concern.

In a waste of his own making, Mungo Park

Observed (on what substrate, he doesn’t say)

A single brilliant tuft, and asked the Lord

For similar support. We can surmise

With reasonable certainty the moss

Was of this genus. We can’t speak for God.