Where’s Your Wiregrass?
Poems come in all shapes and sizes. When they invite us in, they tell us something about society, about people who write poems, and about ourselves.
So this month, in honor of National Poetry Month, I want to share one collection in particular because it catches my breath, makes me gasp at my own sensitivities as well my insensitivities.
And, if tone, pacing, and imagery line up, as they do in Wiregrass and Other Poems by Moira J. Saucer, then I am brought into the greater community where fear and ignorance have the ability to suffocate even the strongest among us.
Consider the injury they evoke in the first stanza of the opening poem:
When you fall
Most people fall away.
It’s human nature.
There you are
inconveniently
sick and poor.
You are trouble-wrapped
in thrift store clothes.
A motley creature
with little possibility
for redemption.
Who is creating that hell? The one who has fallen or those who cannot (or will not) see her as other than someone inconveniently sick and poor?
I catch glimpses of myself here and wince. Such blindness and deafness leaves little room for more than isolating darkness for the one beset with myriad challenges, including homelessness and a body (and heart) on the verge of breaking down.
In this journey, the poet removes herself from the larger world. She seeks the safety of the Wiregrass Plains in Alabama she writes of in the title poem:
Many poets I knew in my youth went away and died.
Others disappeared—merely.
Me, I am hiding in a mobile home in Alabama.
But hiding, she is not.
Instead, her retreat is our entry into the terrain of her life, one emotion at a time. We are with her as she struggles to adjust to the physicality of her own seasons, to the suffering only humanity’s lack of love can bestow, until she loses sight of herself.
Still, like the at-risk gopher and tortoise species who feed off of the wiregrass’ nutrients, she survives with a mix of ambivalence and hope, as suggested in the delicately framed Chrysalis (Queer Butterfly).
I’m trying to see if you are
still waiting ahead on the road
for me to catch up with you.
This chapbook’s strength reflects the very tenacity at the core of wiregrass. According to University of Central Florida’s Virtual Arboretum, this flora species is “an extremely important … groundcover… food source for the threatened … and plays a vital role in carrying small natural fires across the landscape.”
The innate ability of this plant to stay alive is yet another one of its miraculous gifts. As is Moira’s recognition of her own worth as witnessed in this conversation with herself (and with us) she shares in Did I Tell You:
I think
unconditional love
helps.
In the heavy rains,
I have my own amanuensis.
From my kitchen window,
drift roses.
Moira’s work has appeared in numerous publications, as has her art. To read more about this poet’s fine work, visit https://linktr.ee/mjsaucerpoet
This beautifully hand bound, hand stitched collection was published by Ethelzine, 2022 To order and to learn more: https://www.ethelzine.com/shop/wiregrass-and-other-poems-by-moira-j-saucer.
