Garden 

Bear Witness 

Bear witness to the ripen and the rot, to the juice and the imminence. 

The grateful witness drinks the wild gods and wrangles with her polyporous heart. 

We fill a bathtub full of apples for you, cover ourselves in smutz for you, weave a mess of a basket and cry for your departure – your removal. We owe it all to you.  

Sunflowers head drips over themselves, bending, creeping, weeping toward mountain. Just as mountain to river, river to moon, and moon to yeast – a flutter of devotion.  

Sing your songs of grief and become devoted to devotion itself.  

In the name of devotion, we trace rivers, fibers, edges, alders, tendons, strata, ligaments, brooks – all the while, she knew that moon from the mountain would drag us out from the brook, past the river, into tide time.  

Still enchanted by the water’s edge, we begin to weave and wrangle the flow of alders. A nest carved out from land, carved out from bay, carved out by glaciers before that. 

We go to the water’s edge to remember that we are many because we are one. We go to water’s edge with hoof fungus in hand and fire in fungus. We go to the water’s edge to make our most sacred commitments.  

 - Tara Shilo