Gathering moss

It's been a day of unremitting bleakness with low cloud leaking rain showers without cease. I've been nursing my cold, shuttling between the kitchen and my bed, since the rest of the house is unheated.

I managed a brief trip out of doors to air the dog. Actually he can come and go as he pleases, using the cat flap, but that doesn't have the same appeal as a formal walk, or in this case a lurch down a muddy track and a short detour through a boggy, dripping copse. Ravens were croaking overhead: breeding early in the year they may already be eyeing up the territory. Not much to be seen at ground level but moss is one thing that loves our damp climate and covers trees, rocks and ground with a velvety viridian coating.

I found this poem called Moss Gathering by Theodore Roethke (who was also quoted by Kendallishere very recently). Roethke, born in Michigan in 1908, was the son of a German immigrant who was a market gardener and he spent his early years helping in the greenhouse. He suffered from bipolar illness as an adult. In 1963 he had a heart attack and died in a swimming pool which was later filled in and is now, very fittingly, a moss garden.


To loosen with all ten fingers held wide and limber
And lift up a patch, dark green, the kind for lining cemetery baskets
Thick and cushiony, like an old-fashioned doormat,
The crumbling small hollow sticks on the underside mixed with roots,
And wintergreen berries and leaves still stuck to the top -
That was moss-gathering.
But something always went out of me when I dug loose those carpets
Of green, or plunged to my elbows in the spongy yellowish moss of the marshes:
And afterwards I always felt mean, jogging back over the logging road,
As if I had broken the natural order of things in that swampland;
Disturbed some rhythm, old and of vast importance,
By pulling off flesh from the living planet;
As if I had committed , against the whole scheme of life, a desecration.