One of my former roommates used to disappear in the spring and return with bags of morels. I had never tried them before moving to Iowa and they are quite yummy. Of course most things dipped in flour and sauteed in butter will taste pretty good but that was how he liked them. I have since had them cooked in other manners and love their flavor. The ones pictured above are actually Italian morels but I liked the purple flower so there it is.
Mr. Kooser seems to be a nice man so I wanted to follow the rules completely about using his column as noted in the postscript below. A pdf of the column suitable for framing or sharing is here. Enjoy!
(Consider yourselves fortunate as I was very close to posting another picture of the cats when I found this poem in my email.)
American Life in Poetry: Column 102
BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006
Those of us who have hunted morel mushrooms in the early spring have hunted indeed! The morel is among nature's most elusive species. Here Jane Whitledge of Minnesota captures the morel's mysterious ways.
Morel Mushrooms
Softly they come
thumbing up from
firm ground
protruding unharmed.
Easily crumbled
and yet
how they shouldered
the leaf and mold
aside, rising
unperturbed,
breathing obscurely,
still as stone.
By the slumping log,
by the dappled aspen,
they grow alone.
A dumb eloquence
seems their trade.
Like hooded monks
in a sacred wood
they say:
Tomorrow we are gone.
Reprinted from "Wilderness Magazine," Spring, 1993, by permission of the author. Copyright (c) 1993 by Jane Whitledge. This weekly column is supported by The Poetry Foundation, The Library of Congress, and the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. This column does not accept unsolicited poetry.
******************************
American Life in Poetry provides newspapers and online publications with a free weekly column featuring contemporary American poems. The sole mission of this project is to promote poetry: American Life in Poetry seeks to create a vigorous presence for poetry in our culture. There are no costs for reprinting the columns; we do require that you register your publication here and that the text of the column be reproduced without alteration.
1 comment:
Last Spring, The Meister offered to share one of his favorite morrel hunting sites with me. I told him I just didn't have the time, but it's more that I love them as long as someone else gets them and cooks them for me. What a princess, I know.
Post a Comment