Shishkin, Twilight, 1883
Teach the children. We don’t matter so much, but the
children do. Show them daisies and the pale helatica. Teach them the taste of
sassafras and wintergreen. The lives of the blue sailors, mallow, sunbursts,
the moccasin-flowers. And the frisky ones – inkberry, lamb’s-quarters,
blueberries. And the aromatic ones – rosemary, oregano. Give them peppermint to
put in their pockets as they go to school. Give them the fields and the woods
and the possibility of the world salvaged from the lords of profit. Stand them
in the stream, head them upstream, rejoice as they learn to love this green
space they live in, its sticks and leaves and then the silent, beautiful blossoms.
Mary Oliver
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