The Medicinal Properties of Fire
Forest fire remnants
staggered as cattails as
thorny as daggers as
Devil’s Club makes balm
for every ache and blunder.
The devil knows what pain is!
How to give and take away.
Unlocks the Lodgepole
Pine with the tender kiss of blaze.
Clad in a clover oven mitt,
the Haida woman clasps
fingertips to the clusters of pinprick,
clipping them, stripping them down
to their newborn green, the
grandfather plant still towering.
Only borrow. Only, if it flickers.
Driving through Alaska recently we passed fields of scorched earth, where the jagged trunks of teeth shot up like hairs raised on the back of some neck. D said “they almost look like cattails!” (Thanks, D.)
I recently reread a favorite book of mine, The Master & Margarita which is a magical realist tale about the devil wreaking havoc on Russia - throughout the author uses clever turns of phrase in dialogue between the devil and the townspeople, like “The devil knows….” to create tension and more notably make a show of pulling the wool over their eyes.
A few weeks ago, D and I attended a medicinal plants class taught by a woman of the Haida Tribe who brought plant samples. balms and teas from her home near Mount Rainier. She showed us Devil’s Club, a vicious looking plant whose core is used to make an “everything balm” that can relieve a great deal of swelling and pain - it can also be used to make a healing tea. She said that when she harvest plants she asks them first if she may harvest and she only takes the leaves that wave.
A Lodgepole Pine’s pinecone can only sprout once the resin of the pinecone has been scorched by fire… one of the many ways fire occupies both a destructive and renewing role in nature and myth.
I thought the syllables of the back half (starting with ‘Clad… newborn green’) kinda sounded like a fire’s crackle. Try giving it a read out loud :)