Mojave Mosses
“In the Mojave Desert, a translucent crystal offers bryophytes much-needed respite from the heat of the sun.”
― The New York Times, July 29, 2020
For hypolithic mosses,
it seems,
four percent of daylight is right.
They live, the headline says,
by sheltering
under a parasol of translucent quartz.
The crystal scatters
the light’s ultraviolet,
dilutes its heat,
traps the night’s condensed moisture
to moss-sized rain.
I think of these mosses
and consider.
Perhaps we, too, are mosses,
evolving to the parch
of our self-made Mojaves.
Unable to bear the full brightness,
the full seeing.
To recognize fully the Amazon burning,
the Arctic burning,
the Monarchs’ smoke-colored missing migration.
An experiment not meant to last.
And yet we found shelter within it,
we pondered our lives and the lives of others,
thirsted, slept.
To the implausible green of existence,
for-better, for-worse,
we offered our four-percent portion of praises,
for-better, for-worse,
our four-percent portion of comprehension.
This poem first appeared in Scientific American (2021).
—
Jane Hirshfield’s most recent book is The Asking: New & Selected Poems (Knopf, 2023). Her work appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times, Scientific American, Poetry, and ten editions of Best American Poems. A former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and the founder of Poets for Science, she was elected in 2019 into the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
