seven names for a plant
John C. Ryan (Edith Cowan University, Australia)
.
.
such is the abundance of the orange-coloured
blossoms, that the Colonists at King George’s Sound
compare it to a tree on fire;
-John Lindley (1839) A Sketch of the Vegetation of the Swan River Colony
.
.
mudja,
beacon of the banksia scrub
soft summer burning stirs
movement to the coast
.
ghost bush,
waystation of the dead
glissading spirits to the sea
branches pose ghosts like buds
.
christmas tree,
burning with sun’s burning
antithesis of spruce, sering
the cold forests of Doug Fir
.
tree of the dead,
haustoria crawling into rock
striking interpose between
luminous sky, dank underworld
.
nuytsia floribunda,
abundantly flowering namesake
of the Dutchman who seized
coastline with cartography
.
cabbage tree,
plumage in whorls of yellow
trunk laden with water
& the stench of necrosis
.
a tree on fire,
obscured in the bright wash of
birok, burning a burnless
land, igniting orchid passion
.
like a soiree
of leaf and light, root and loam
irretrievable from the name
is the love that goes on.
.
.
John C. Ryan is a second-year Ph.D. candidate at Edith Cowan University. His dissertation invokes the writer-as-botanist tradition of John Clare, Henry David Thoreau, and Pablo Neruda to create poetic interpretations of the unusual and stunning flora of Southwest Australia. He is a graduate of the University of Lancaster’s M.A. in Environmental Philosophy, and his research interests include ecophilosophy, landscape writing, and the human-plant relationship.
