On our weekend in Wytham Woods we and the students wrote a few words of poetry in response to finding and learning about fungi, and then standing still and looking closely as something in the woods for a few minutes. The woods were in full autumn colours, everything was wet, and there were amazing fungi everywhere. These are what the students wrote that day.
Battlefield
The flora’s fallen brethren
Consumed by the unseen scent
Ready to set the cycle again
Old and fallen trees, decaying in the woods
It was dying, but, it was helping new lives
To appear, small twenty mushrooms.
Nutty, wise
Lucky disguise.
Caring, strong
Daring song.
Three little mushrooms living off the dead,
With nowhere to grow but up ahead
Three little mushrooms living among the dead,
It’s a graveyard someone once said…
Branch like fungi, grey with a narrow roof surfacing gills
Existed in a colony exuding a nutty scent.
A broken tree trunk with red mushrooms growing out of it’s broken end.
“lying broken detached by my roots although unknown red raw roots are growing beneath me.”
Cream and brown splothches like bubbles rising skywards
Shortly to fall earthwards as the tree trunk dissolves
Fungi oasis in a birch stump. Thriving where the tree is no longer. Silent in the cracking, dripping, plinking, wish-ing soundscape.
Fungi littered around you
Green splattered around the bark
Roots buried deep
Unmoving.
In the greatest of winds
Only few branches remain.
