Litha Witchgrass

I don’t need your praise
to survive. I was here first,
before you were here, before
you ever planted a garden.
And I’ll be here when only the sun and moon
are left, and the sea, and the wide field.

I will constitute the field.

The lines above are from Louise Glück’s poem, “Witchgrass,” recently featured on the Poem of the Day from the Poetry Foundation. The poem is in the voice of the “witchgrass,” a weed like bamboo, nearly impossible to kill by organic means, and one that laughs at RoundUp. It runs tubers beneath the ground, so effectively digging it up is nearly impossible. And its grassy stems are ten feet high, at least.

The witchgrass laughs at us. Glück draws a picture of the witchgrass understanding itself as a creature of disorder where gardeners want to plant flowers and fruit in ordered rows. And then at the end, Ah, the end! “I will constitute the field.”

The finality of those lines, “And I’ll be here when only the sun and moon / are left, and the sea, and the wide field. / I will constitute the field.”

The weeds know that we’ll be gone someday. (And if we continue our reckless ways, sooner rather than later.) We’ll be gone someday and the bugs and bacteria, the sun and moon, and the witchgrass will smile at our hubris.

It makes me think of the eternal stability and change and change and change of the Wheel of the Year and the Wheel of the Age. As those of us who are UU sing in “Lady of the Season’s Laughter,” “Lady of the Turning Age.”

Our guts are full of trillions—trillions—of bacteria. We are colonies at least as much as we are individual beings. We are like beehives or ant colonies. A strange thing to consider, no?

We feel like individuals. We feel like onenesses, but it seems to me that there is only one Oneness: It is All. That Oneness is the Universe in all Her spinning galaxies, all her dancing stars.

We, on the other hand, are not individuals at all. It is only a trick of consciousness that gives us the sense of individualism. We are full of viruses, mites, tiny microbes of all kinds, and especially bacteria. Bacteria that keep us alive and that will happily devour us once we’re dead.

We are children of Oneness, but we are destined for compost, my loves, we are destined to be food not only for worms, but for witchgrass. We will push up not only daisies, but much more likely, lamb’s quarters and dandelions and bamboo.

On this week of the Strawberry Moon and the strength and glory of the northern hemisphere Summer Solstice, I think of apices, the apex of Luna, the apex of Sol. The brightest day, the brightest night. And now both are waning.

As we enjoy the brightness of the day, the brightness of the night, let us note as well that they are, indeed waning. That the highest point means there’s nowhere to go but down. That Sol’s influence has begun to wane and will do more and more until we come to the gathering dark of that other solstice, six months from now. That Luna’s influence wanes this month and will wax again soon enough.

So we grow, we rest. We stand straight and tall and we wilt. Here, at the height of things, we do well to remember that at the end of things, it is the witchgrass who will abide. The witchgrass who will constitute the field. It is Earth, God, Goddess, the Oneness who will abide, and the witchgrass is its child, as surely as any of us are.