Tag Archives: field

Day 08 – field + 3-in-1

Seems like there’s a few mushroom memory poems in me trying to make their way out. So we’d best let them. It is an interesting corollary of creative activity that once you start down a certain pathway of thinking/exploration, more & more bubbles to the surface, including things you may not have thought about in decades or even remember you remembered.

WARNING: The Factoid is a pretty shocking and revelatory reveal that will quite possibly BLOW your mind.

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field mushrooms
Agaricus multitudinous 

one of my favourite memories 
as a child was wandering 
the wet grassed dew paddocks
                  in my wellies 

& finding huge white beauties 
with chocolate brown gills 
smelling of earth & muddy fertility 
                  some the size of plates

talking with my parents
several days ago we agreed
don’t see as many as we used to 
                  anecdotally at least 

back then the adventure 
was the finding not the eating 
some things stay the same
                  but others change drastically 

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Day 08 Factoid – Not all mushrooms taste the same

the unusual instance of 3 mushrooms in 1
Agaricus bisporus

1. Button
entirely white
baby blobs of bland
reason for near universal popularity
             unknown

2. Cremini 
brown capped 
no visible gills
firmer texture  
             difficult to source in Oz

3. Portobello
large rugged roofed
flat brown caps 
& visible gills
             at last looking like a proper mushy

4. Revelation
all these mushrooms are the same
the minor difference is age
the major difference is taste
             (you’re welcome)

Day 17 — fallow + souls

The Climate Change book I finished today concludes with several chapters on fertility — both the earth’s & the author’s. In so doing she mentions a beautiful word I have long loved & long wanted to use in a poem. That word is fallow. The poem isn’t quite there, though the verse I’m gonna share, is close. It also prompted a parallel poem instead of a Poetic Factoid.

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fallow

by growing single crops super-intensively
the brutal industrial-agricultural industry
has abandoned an ancient methodology
for keeping the earth fertile — they forget fallow

so desperate are they for continuous every increasing
crop yields they dump on (usually chemical) fertiliser, irrigate heavily 
& dump more chemicals on to kill the weeds, insects & other pests 
that thrive on monoculture

more traditional agricultural societies 
use natural methods to maintain soil fertility 
including allowing fields to lie fallow 
rest, regenerate and re-submit energy into the soil
often by planting nitrogen-fixing legumes 
like beans into a variety of crops grown side by side. 

but even if the moderns can’t do this
they can allow fields to rest fallow
let the dirt grow dormant, 
go quiet, move more slow
rest recuperate recharge

fallow also works in humans

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Day 17 A special +1 poem

A love poem with a difference. 100 years.

fallowsoul

Souls, like farm fields,
need to lie fallow for a time
before returning richer than before
so rest now in that far off fallow gold sea
— & may we meet again in the years that follow