Make This Place Green Again
A thimbleful of May thoughts
How about the dopamine of spring? Is this still a thing we can huff
even while we whine to dig a burrow, pull the dirt into our eyes,
stuff la-la fingers in our ears? How about the stars of jasmine, the riot
of poppies, all those mustard fields a bright yellow orgy just begging
you to drop to your knees. Do we still get off on that? Stumble like bees
from one uplifted face to the next, nectar sticky and buzzing for more?
Everything everywhere is a blur of atrocity and nonsense in the sense
that nothing makes sense, it’s all children for dinner and guns for the masses.
This isn’t the sort of world I ordered. I spend months thinking I got off
at the wrong cosmic station, I should have ridden the comet a few solars
further but then again it’s May and a hysteria of wisteria, bruise-purple
and dripping from the walls like an extravagance we forgot we had time for.
Like the earth who mothered us wants to say Hey! You’re all gonna die, yes,
and some of you more horribly than others but it’s not so bad to be a corpse
when you fur your ribs with moss and let nothing more anxious than a mushroom
colonize your brain. I’m not trying to romanticize the apocalypse, I’m just saying
there’s a cycle here. There’s reason when nothing can be reasoned. There are
bumbles in the lemon tree and blossoms on the olives and one of these days
we’re gonna realize these dollars are green enough for the compost bin.
Let the worms do their work, let the kudzu eat the South, it is the time
of lettuces and loquat trees and lavender. It is the time of jimson weed
and bobble-headed clover, of hairy bittercress and red-dead nettle,
marestail and spurge. It is the time of wildness, within us and without.
It is the time, it is the time, there is no better time than this.
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Copyright © 2026 LaDonna Witmer • {all photos by author}
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