Melissa Kwasny


Moss Campion

What if you and I walked together and what we saw
was what we said, that what we said was directed
by each other’s attention? We could create a new language,
know each other in a different way, the phrases rising,
if they do arise, like the moss campion in spring,
pink mounds amidst the sullenness of the sagebrush flats.
In Italian, improvisamente means suddenly, a surprise
out of the blue, whereas in English, to improvise means
to surprise ourselves by acting spontaneously,
moving forward in response, making do with the materials
at hand. The ancient service berry, youth-lanky
after you pruned it, our snap peas elbowing toward us
through cold soil, too much loveliness if it weren’t
for suffering, mortality tossed into paradise like a grenade.
The opposite of violence is a flower, the flower a cliché.
The moss campion is a flower, but also a feeling,
a low awning, a small shelter to keep our spirits safe
while rain tramples the transplanted starts of the cosmos.
We want to believe that the ground may look unhealed
even when it is healing, though we are born into a war,
one side waging it with weapons, one aligned with
the earth, which says little, as the aspen leaf says less and less.

Melissa Kwasny is the author of seven collections of poetry, most recently The Cloud Path (Milkweed Editions 2024), as well as Earth Recitals: Essays on Image and Vision and the nonfiction book Putting on the Dog: The Animal Origins of What We Wear. She lives in western Montana.

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