Urtica dioica
You only need to touch a grown specimen
once to identify a stinging nettle.
The spearhead-shaped leaf’s pointed tip
and serrated edges
will remind you thereafter to beware
its tiny
hypodermic needles,
which inject histamines and formic acid
in human skin.
.
The stinging nettle dies back
to the root each year,
glows a deep green
when short in spring,
and pales as it grows up to six feet tall.
This most nutritious wild edible
lives world-wide, like us.
A nettle whisperer,
she can harvest nettles without gloves
and get them through the neck of the kombucha bottle
without being stung.
She can’t seem to get enough,
harvests the leaves in spring and again in summer,
roots in fall.
Drinks the dried leaf tea every day for years,
in late winter looks forward
to nettles’ vivid resurrection,
the first leafy greens of the year.
Then she’ll make the tasty Irish soup
that kept her ancestors alive during the famine.
Now, for luxury’s sake, she’ll throw in a few potatoes.
—
Haiku translator Harry Behn told Karina Lutz as a child to “write from experience.” So she gathered experience: as an environmental activist; editor, reporter, and magazine publisher; professor, yoga teacher, and workshop facilitator; farmer, carpenter, and seamstress. She helped secure passage of sustainable energy legislation, thwart a proposed megaport, launch a green power nonprofit, and startup a permaculture cooperative. Her poems are widely published, including her books Post-Catholic Midrashim and Preliminary Visions.
