How to Love a Broken World

The full moon laughed in joy last night as the fluttering shadow of a moth drank honeysuckle nectar. The peepers sang in the river, the moonlight spreading like smoke in the water. White mayapple flowers as big as my palm cried out stark in the darkness of the understory. There was so much Twinleaf on the forest floor, I felt as if I could walk across a sea of sage-colored lobes.

I collect worries like pebbles and stack them in my heart. Usually I can unstack them bit by bit, easing the heaviness I carry with me so I can keep walking. But sometimes, sometimes the stack gets too high and dams the stream of my mind. When the system polices my language around historic injustice and marginalization. When an institution holds the key to my self-knowledge yet deprives me the voice to express it. When the oppressive systems that have bound my life seem too large and messy and tangled that I fear I may never have the language to describe the net I’m trapped in. When I despair I may never have the chance to make some meaning out of the trauma of my life because I’m too busy trying to explicate it for outsiders, parse it for insiders, and gaslight myself into thinking I’m a fraud. It’s at these moments the stack of pebbles topples me with their weight. And it’s at these moments that the land saves me.

I once thought it was the land of my home in Appalachia that I hated. When you are poisoned then denied justice and healthcare, when you escape to only to be called epithets wherever you go, it’s natural, I think, to blame the place. I thought if I could get away, then I could forget. My family isn’t even from here, I would say. If I get away, I can make a new story, I would say. Turns out that’s the most Appalachian feeling there is, this sense of “getting out.” But when you are poisoned by sewage in your water and made sick for life from toxic black mold in your elementary school and breathe in VOCs from the greenwashed factories pushed down your community’s throat, there is no getting away. The poisoned land becomes part of you. Forever. We are irrevocably entangled with the land’s trauma.

But it also means we are irrevocably entangled with its beauty, too.

The craggy hills and hollers of this land have gifted us with an unparalleled spring after a year of desperate drought. The forest floor bursts with sharp cutleaf toothwort and dangling Dutchman’s breeches. Ruby-slippered columbine weeps from the limestone cliffs. There’s so many trout lilies that it looks like schools of speckled fish leap from the leaf litter.

This is Appalachia, too. Amidst the sorrow, joy leaps from the hills. We don’t just survive trauma. We thrive. Because the land carries us, even when it hurts too.

And these old, old mountains have taught us patience. The ruins of past attempts at exploitation lie at our feet. The factories will one day crumble. The pipelines will be left abandoned. The poison will dissipate through the work of our healing hands, planting seeds of a forest we dare not dream. And we will teach the once-powerful how to love a broken world.

I wrote this poem as part of Rowen White’s course “Reverent Curiosity: Writing a Field Guide to the Senses” hosted by Writing the Wild. Our prompt was to get small and low and to practice writing to our more-than-human kin, not for them.

Praying

The river flows like molten silver
From the strong spring rains
The wind whips
Around the limestone cliffs
That weep ancient sea spray
Red silk slippers of Columbine
Cry from the jutting rocks above
White stars of chickweed
Call from the understory
And I get down down down
Like an ant
Like a fly
And see the red-eyed flower of wild ginger
Beneath a house of heart-shaped leaves
For that flower,
I drop my worries,
My heartache,
My angst among
The muddy tractor-worn path
To that flower I ask:
How do you live among the broken cliffs?
And then a bumblebee rumbles by
The trees creak in the gales
And a whole mountainside of flowers
Sings in the glint of sun through bare branches
The red-eyed flower says not in words
But in the voice of a hundred beloved wilds:
All I know what to do is grow

You are reading Entangled Worlds, a newsletter from Nichole Amber Moss filled with poems and poetic prose that radically imagines the more-than-human worlds beyond the Anthropocene. You can find me on Instagram and Bluesky.