The Lichens, the First Settlers of New Lands

robert: You were asking if there were any great poems about lichens, and i couldn't think of any at first. But i did across this actually fantastic poem by jane hirshfield that i'm not going to read in full. The title is for the labaria usnia, witch's hair, map lichen beard, lichen ground, lichen shield. Which is great, because the title itself is almost like a line from a walt whitman poem. And so in this poem, she calls them a marriage of fungi and algy chemists of the air, changers of nitrogen unusable into nitrogen usable.