image from pinterest.com
We of the Fungi
“There are thousands of little mosses and fungi that
are seen mostly as unsightly objects, but when seen
with the eyes of a poet, they become radiant of
beauty.”--Henry David Thoreau.
Welcome to the Kingdom of Fungi.
My name is Malcolm Mushroom.
My best pals are Timothy Toadstool,
Yancy Yeast,
Robert Rot,
Marion Mold, and
Mildred Mildew.
We denizens are often
misunderstood, and often
survive unnoticed. Our colonies
range from microscopic to mammoth.
You think you know us, but believe
me, we have secrets that predate
recorded history. Until recently
Botanists considered us to be
plants, but actually we are of
a separate kingdom from both
plants and animals, and we lean
most toward animal characteristics.
We are complex co-creators.
We are the principal decomposers
of all organic materials, and ecosystems.
We, kind of like you, are heterotrophs--you
know, incapable of making our own food. We
are unidevourers, liking to chow down on both
plants and animals. Our love-life is both sexual
and asexual.
We are whelped
from 3.8 million species,
and you have only studied
and labeled 148,000. That leaves
a lot of mystery between us. Some of
our more fecund varieties secrete psychotropic
compounds. The hippies and philosophers really dug
us, like pigs and their truffles. We consider our
selves triple erotic, but we are told we
are eutarotic.
We can tolerate that some of us
can be a food source for you,
but like any of your other neighbors,
we can be friendly, or
we can kick your ass.
So don’t forget
to acknowledge
our complexities,
and respect
our properties.
We of the Fungi,
thriving beneath your feet, wish
you the best of health.
Glenn Buttkus
Posted over at d'Verse Poet's Pub
9 comments:
This is wonderful Glenn, and tge concrete shape is spellbinding! Great post brother! Don’t know if you know this. A “Armillaria Ostoyae” mushroom, in the Malheur National Forest, in the Strawberry Mountains of eastern Oregon, was found to be the largest fungal colony in the world, spanning an area of 3.5 square miles (2,200 acres; 9.1 km2).
You've created a justly noble yet friendly and inviting speech from the fungi to us humans. The image at the top is gorgeous and I do love that opening quote. It's all in how you look as to how you will apprehend the beauty of it all. Thank you for the lesson in such a palatable form. I love those shapes. Fungi are our friends :)
I really enjoyed where you went with this prompt. I had to smile at the part where you gave them names, it brings them to life. Great use of form.
Lovely, Glenn! Well done!
-David
Oh Glenn, I imagined this poem as a psychedelic cartoon, a Fantasia for Fungi! I love the way you packed in all the facts in an easily digestible, chatty form, and the alliterative phrase ‘complex co-creators’.
I love the concrete shape of this, Glenn, like a bracket fungus. So much information here, told with a twinkling eye and a conversational tone. Your fungal voice is friendly - but not TOO friendly. They are amazing life forms, and the more I learn about them the more amazed I get. Thank you for this.
Excellent - I learned so much from your poem and I really felt as though I was listening to fungi talking to me, without having ingested any mushrooms: fun indeed!
So much information and not an omlette or a risotto in sight :)
I love the thought of such a silent community that lives beneath our feet... some kind of symbiosis we are not even aware of.
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