Earth Smoke. Fumaria officinalis
[One of a series of poems I wrote about common weeds. Mudgee is a country town in the west of New South Wales.]
Earth Smoke. Fumaria officinalis
Unnoticed like beggars or dew in ditches
your tiny blossoms sit in serried rows
of pink flies waiting for lift-off. Scrambler.
Bitter sheep delight, your pinks dye wool
yellow. Rampant mendicant where soil is poor
or we’ve mucked it up in our obsessive
focus on food. Dirt births your blue-green
smoke, a vapour, burnt, expelling demons.
In Mudgee you smother wheat. Proudly
humble like some saint, disdaining
bugs & help, you go fuck yourself
& then set every seed. The old books swore
by you, since, Taken with good Venice Treacle,
it is good against Plague, not to mention
your being a most singular thing
against hypochondriack melancholy
in any person whatsoever. A most post-
modern herb. If only there weren’t
that carcinogenic sanguinarine blowing
up glaucomatose eyes, expelling unready
babies from their clingy wombs.
