American Life in Poetry

Those of us who have hunted morel mushrooms in the spring have hunted indeed. The morel is among nature’s most elusive species.

Here Jane Whitledge of Minnesota captures the morel’s mysterious ways.

Morel Mushrooms

Softly they come

thumbing up from

firm ground

protruding unharmed.

Easily crumbled

and yet

how they shouldered

the leaf and mold

aside, rising

unperturbed,

breathing obscurely,

still as stone.

By the slumping log,

by the dappled aspen,

they grow alone.

A dumb eloquence

seems their trade.

Like hooded monks

in a sacred wood

they say:

Tomorrow we are gone.