Poet Melinda Mueller gives voice to Cascadian ghost forests

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.

Melinda 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 meaningghost, specter,disembodied spirit.Demon.

The forests are haunted.

Press an ear to the barkyou can hear scribbling,Beetle larvae graving the woodin their dark underworld,marking the tree for death.

In runic calligraphies,in cuneiforms, in hieroglyphsof hunger they writeby excavation, bygnawing forwardtoward the next life,the life with wings.

The larval galleries are inkedsometimes with blue-stain fungus.

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

The dying trees flush redthen blench to gray.High on the mountainswhere air is arid and coldthey stand for decades,ruined, limbs rattlingwhen the wind is up.

These are called “ghost forests.”