American Life in Poetry
Let’s celebrate the warm days of spring with a poem for mushroom hunters, this one by Amy Fleury, who lives in Louisiana.
First Morel
Up from wood rot,
wrinkling up from duff
and homely damps,
spore-born and cauled
like a meager seer,
it pushes aside earth
to make a small place
from decay. Bashful,
it brings honeycombed
news from below
of the coming plenty
and everything rising.
Copyright 2013 by Amy Fleury from her most recent book of poems, “Sympathetic Magic,” Southern Illinois University Press, 2013. Poem reprinted by permission of the author and publisher. American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation and the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.