Today’s poem touches on memory, both the conscious desire to remember what is seen, and also to remember what was. It also touches on the invasive flora brought by settlers to North America, both as medicinal and ornamental plants.
Only about 2% of native prairie grasslands remain in the US, though there are efforts to restore prairie grasslands through both planting native species (though weeds introduced from industrially grown seed stock are an issue) and also through experiments with broadening grazing areas for bison. You can read more about restoration efforts here, a site published by the USGS Northern Prairie Wildlife Research Center.
There is also an interesting link here to a timeline showing introduction of invasive species to North America.
Practicing My Lines
Rehearsing my memory,
as if that improves it.
Out on the grassy plain full
of golden-green cancerous flowers
beautiful for tenaciousness,
insurgent, insidious, in
the way new overruns old
when resistance is down,
still I loved the waves of sunshine
streaming over the prairie,
how settlers brought beauty
to relieve unending horizon.
Still I grasped their need
to make the prairie home.
And in doing so, doom,
destroy. Beneath bounty:
the spreading suckers, claiming.
Through-line of enjoyment:
fragility, impermanence,
a sense of one’s eventual
destructions unintended.
Grasses by rivers, grasses
across plains, grasses
as far as the purgatory of memory
will allow. Oh the ocean
that lapped these ruminant hills,
now only known in mineralized
bones, fossil footprints, faded
strata below thin topsoil.
And only by such furrowed memories
can I expect sufficient recall.
~~
Like many invasive species of flowers, yellow toadflax (flower shown at the top of this post), is pretty but tenacious. This is but one of the invasive species you can learn about at USDA’s National Invasive Species Information Center.