Poems by Gabriel Dunsmith

Foraging

by Gabriel Dunsmith

Gabriel lives on a peninsula surrounded by the bay Faxaflói ("Horse Mane Bay") and in the shadow of the mountain Esja, in Iceland.

Hearing the golden-winged warbler and knowing it may seldom sing again,
I lift a rotting log to reveal a colony of pinhead mushrooms

whose distant cousins deep in the trees folks in East Tennessee
used to call woodfish, which they scrounged up when there was scarce any

corn in the corncrib or sausage in the larder, with hog-killing
time still months away. Those frilled and fecund fungi are one of many

things I’ve yet to taste, though my grandfather once led us looking
through the wet-leaf, damp-bark springtime until we hit the driveway,

circled home. It’s true that some treasures will never be found
in time to pull us from the brink, while others name to us our losses,

just as, like countless creatures of the earth, we’re bound
to search for what we love until it’s gone.