Yellow Glacier Lily, <i>Erythronium Grandiflorum</i>

Abstract

‘Yellow glacier lily, Erythronium grandiflorum’ is a poem from a long sequence called ‘Seeds’ that thinks about forms of resistance, survival, and emergence in the context of climate change and the sixth mass extinction. Each numbered section or ‘seed’ centres on a different organism or human-made object: lentil, snowdrop, chinook salmon, ‘the beautiful cell,’ codex, lenticel, wasp, honey bee, tiny house, among others. Each ‘seed’ in this long poem might be thought of as a blueprint, whether simple human-made tool/concept or complex organism driven by its DNA to adapt to and respond to the current existential threat. The poem also considers the idea of attention as a moral act, as observed by the neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist: ‘without alertness, we are as if asleep, unresponsive to the world around us; without vigilance, we cannot become aware of anything we do not already know.’ It attempts to focus attention as a form of respect for the yellow glacier lily, the human, the grizzly bear, as interacting agents in the subalpine region of Cascadia, all as beings in their own right, withdrawn, dark noumena.