“To the Moss” by W.S. Merwin

To the Moss

How you came to know all that you are sure of
how you discovered the darkness of green
uncurling into the daylight out of
its origins unsounded as your own
how you learned to fashion shapes of water
into softness itself that stayed in place
and kept some secret caves of wherever
you were but with such welcome seemed to rise
that in time you became as some believe
a model for the cheek and then the breast
the wren felt she knew most of that before
there were breasts or cheeks and she made out of
living bits of you the globe of her nest
as though that was what you had grown there for

— W.S. Merwin, from Present Company (2005) published by Copper Canyon Press.

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Photo “Moss” by Chris Sorge, is used under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic License (CC BY-SA 2.0), and can be found on Flickr here.