Poem of the Week: 'Grass sings to her roots' by Jacquiline Gabbitas

Grass sings to her roots

Man thinks these are the colours

of air and water, of light and freeing,

but before this they were ours:

our blades are green, our lowly stems

the red of poppies, pink of damask,

our rhizomes white as redemption.

And you, my loves, are palest yellow

like the long memory of sunlight

from a rainbow on a glacial floe.

  Like the many vegetal voices in the pamphlet-length sequence Small Grass, this poem invites us to take up a fresh perspective of the many existing opinons we have imposed onto the organic world, and in this case, the origins of hues. Small Grass speaks in varied tones: the ground breaking in spring, 'all I had was heat and carbon'; the grass singing the praise of the cloud, 'a blanket warm / and barely penetrable'; the grass lamenting marred nature, 'As the virus is to man, / man is to Earth'.

This collection of poetry is also interlaced with haunting black-and-white artworks by Frances Barry; available to purchase on our website here.

By Eiffel Gao