For the Lichens
On January 24, 2017, the poet Jane Hirshfield was boiling mad. Five days into Donald Trump’s presidency, his administration had cut mentions of climate change from its website; in several federal agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Agriculture, employees were forbidden from speaking publicly about their research without authorization. Hirshfield had long written with urgency about the climate, and championed the link between arts and sciences—both “forms of investigation,” she once said, “that can sometimes expand the given, actual existence they respond to and question.” So this felt personal. By 5 p.m., she had written a poem: “On the Fifth Day.”
In April, Hirshfield ended up reading that poem at the March for Science on the Washington Mall, for an audience of about 50,000 people. That and another explicitly political work—“Let Them Not Say”—both went viral in 2017, and Hirshfield started the movement Poets for Science. In 2020, she released her collection Ledger, which wrestles with environmental catastrophe, refugees, hunger, and human extinction.
And yet, as much as her poems have struck a chord with despondent readers, Hirshfield doesn’t believe her job is simply to point a finger. “Walking around in the everyday, I can have a flash of anger towards certain decisions which are made in the halls of power,” she said in March. “But that’s not poetry.” What is the role of poetry, then, in desperate times?
Her poem “For the Lichens,” from 2011, suggests an answer to that question—though perhaps not an obvious one. An ode to crusty strands of fungus and algae, the work is strangely sweet, like a love letter passed to a middle-school crush. “When I saw you,” she writes, “… you were gray-green, incomprehensible, old.” By illuminating just a small cranny of the earth with such blushing admiration, she reminds us of how astonishing the rest is too. “The world greets us still with beauty, every morning,” she has said. “We will work to save only what we first love.”
Lichens absorb and retain nutrients from their surroundings, helping them to survive even in extreme conditions. Hirshfield clearly sees some parallels between this process and that of a poet—particularly one prone, at times, to despair. “No matter what is happening in your life or the world’s life,” she said in the March interview, you can put that experience, however hopeless, into words. And with that act, “you do have agency.”
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