My old friend Lee Ann Brown wrote this poem about Polk Salad in her book In the Laurels, Caught. She wrote it from notes jotted on a day with the herbalist Mary Morgaine Thames, in North Carolina, learning about wild plants.
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POKE SALLET
is cooked not raw
stay ahead
of the red
Eat in spring
cook when 6 inches or less
lymph cleanser
2 boils
Do Not drink the potlikker
Eat the berry
1 on the 1st day
2 on the 2nd day
3 on the 3rd day
How far do you
spit out the poisonous seeds?
become a dynamic accumulator
bringing up minerals from below
Children in a school near here used poke ink
It was that with which they wrote
any daughter paints her arms
the way to play the plants
on paper the unfixed juice goes from bright magen-
ta to a dried blood color
the man who built our house
first dreamed of a pokeberry sky
but after a hot day of crushing berries
and smearing the boards, gave into Benjamin Moore
it’s “hard to fix”
that color more bright than cochineal