Anyone who sings the praises of Skunk Cabbage must be crazy, right? But hold on a second. The harbinger of earliest spring in Northern Ohio is a lot like us--a survivor of terrible winters, something deep-rooted in the area, shaped by the Lake Effect, and overall a tough hombre! And, yea, like us doesn't always smell too good. One of America's greatest poets, Mary Oliver, grew up in Maple Heights, just southeast of Cleveland. Mary Oliver has written many wonderful poems over the years ("Wild Geese"--one of the greatest), and below is her homage to Skunk Cabbage:
Skunk Cabbage
And now as the iron rinds over
the ponds start dissolving,
you come, dreaming of ferns and flowers
and new leaves unfolding,
upon the brash
turnip-hearted skunk cabbage
slinging its bunches of leaves up
through the chilling mud.
You kneel beside it. The smell
is lurid and flows out in the most
unabashed way, attracting
into itself a continual spattering
of protein. Appalling its rough
green caves, and the thought
of the thick root nested below, stubborn
and powerful as instinct!
But these are the woods you love,
where the secret name
of every death is life again - a miracle
wrought surely not of mere turning
but of dense and scalding reenactment. Not
tenderness, not longing, but daring and brawn
pull down the frozen waterfall, the past.
Ferns, leaves, flowers, the last subtle
refinements, elegant and easeful, wait
to rise and flourish.
What blazes the trail is not necessarily pretty.
Mary Oliver
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