June 21 2025 Work Party

A Green Thought 
by Katharine Towers

Say instead it was an evening in head-high
bracken with its smell of dark and medicine.
Thinking green of the infecting fern

where you may crouch and not be known,
lodging your feet for good amid the stalks.
A bower is a dwelling place or once it was

a cage for pent-up singing birds. 
Look down to see the warp and weft of root.
All the world is in these clutches.                        

Look up to clock the fern’s drab underneath
blotched with spores you mustn’t breathe.
Breathe in deep. There’s nowhere else to live.