Poet Melinda Mueller gives voice to Cascadian ghost forests

April 18, 2023 / 7:03 am

Each day during the month of April, KUOW is highlighting the work of Seattle-based poets for National Poetry Month. In this series curated by Seattle Civic Poet and Ten Thousand Things host Shin Yu Pai, you'll find a selection of poems for the mind, heart, senses, and soul.

elinda Mueller was a coauthor of an early list of rare, threatened, and endangered plant species of Washington State. Her scientific knowledge and deep attention to nature give voice to the ghost forests that were once verdant woodland in her poem "Larva."

Melinda Mueller was born in Helena, Montana. She earned a degree in Botany at the University of Washington and Masters in Biology at Central Washington. Mueller’s most recent poetry collection, "Mary’s Dust", was published by Entre Rios Books in 2018. "The After", was released by Entre Rios Press in 2017. "What the Ice Gets: Shackleton’s Antarctic Expedition, 1914-1916" (Van West & Company, 2000) received a 2001 Washington State Book Award and the American Library Notable Books Award for Poetry, in 2002. Melinda recently retired after teaching high school science for 39 years at Seattle Academy of Arts & Sciences.

Larva

From a Latin word meaning
ghost, specter,
disembodied spirit.
Demon.

The forests are haunted.

Press an ear to the bark
you can hear scribbling,
Beetle larvae graving the wood
in their dark underworld,
marking the tree for death.

In runic calligraphies,
in cuneiforms, in hieroglyphs
of hunger they write
by excavation, by
gnawing forward
toward the next life,
the life with wings.

The larval galleries are inked
sometimes with blue-stain fungus.

What is being said?
Fiat justicia, ruat caelum
(Let justice be done
though the heavens fall)?
Fiat justicia, ne pereat mundus
(Let justice be done
that the world not perish)?

The dying trees flush red
then blench to gray.
High on the mountains
where air is arid and cold
they stand for decades,
ruined, limbs rattling
when the wind is up.

These are called “ghost forests.”

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Shin Yu Pai
Host, Ten Thousand Things

Shin Yu Pai is the current Civic Poet for The City of Seattle (2023-24) and host of KUOW's podcast Ten Thousand Things (formerly The Blue Suit). She is an award-winning writer and visual artist based in Seattle.
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