The Stations of the Moss
I.
The stations of the moss
are marked by garden canes.
These days we say they are stations
on the path to restoration not redemption
in the cloudy eyes of an ancient creator god
or of an earth mother yet in the dark pools
we recall boggarts drained away who
we believe powerless to judge.
This is not the path to crucifixion.
Neither is this the path to a bog burial.
Here everything sinks - most of all crosses.
II.
No, this is no longer the path to death,
but to another life where stigmata,
spear-wounds, blows to the
head, strangulations,
and drowning
HEAL
beyond the body
of the tortured land -
drained, cut, extracted, milled.
III.
And now-upon-a time-pilgrims come to kneel
at the places where they find common cottongrass
hare’s tail cottongrass, cross-leaved heath
and common heather - ling, the bells
that ring without church.
These garden canes mark
reintroductions of rare bog species -
bog cranberry, bog rosemary, bog myrtle
to fend off the midges, the mosquitoes,
and the horseflies and the deer flies
the blood-drinkers of the rain.
Here we find miracles -
the round-leaved sundew
with its yellow leaves and sticky
red hairs for catching flies,
lesser bladderwort bladders
moving within one ten thousandth
of a second to catch its prey.
Places to kiss white beak sedge.
Sphagnum mosses and polytrichum
cushioning our weary knees.
IV.
And so we KNEEL
to feel the bog water
sink into our knee joints,
to witness the profundity
of each MIRACLE.
This poem is based on my experience of working in peatland restoration on the Manchester Mosslands. Little Woolden Moss was drained and extracted for peat until bought by the Lancashire Wildlife Trust in 2012. Here we have been re-wetting and re-vegetating by planting cottongrasses and Sphagnum mosses followed by more specialist bog species.
On Astley Moss, which is less damaged, we have been reintroducing rarer plants such as white-beak sedge, great sundew, and lesser bladderwort, along with the large heath butterfly. Reintroduction is an essential part of the restoration process as it brings back species who play an important part in the ecosystem and can’t get there on their own due to habitat fragmentation.
Lorna Smithers
is a poet, author, awenydd, Brythonic polytheist, and devotee of Gwyn ap Nudd. Her three books: Enchanting the Shadowlands, The Broken Cauldron, and Gatherer of Souls are published by the Ritona imprint of Gods & Radicals Press. She works as a trainee for the Wildlife Trust restoring Lancashire’s precious peatlands.