I Am the Grass; I Cover All

by Jonathan Shipley

I walk the marsh. Walt Whitman’s words wash over me. “A child said, What is the grass? Fetching it to me with full hands; how could I answer the child?....I do not know what it is anymore than he.”

I walk on. “I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.”

Spring has arrived at Cherokee Marsh. Tundra swans and pelicans visit the Yahara. Sandhill cranes stilt through the cattails. The oaks are sighing in the soft wind. Soon, leaves. Soon, green. Soon, the vibrancy of life returns.

In the meantime, the marsh awakes slowly from winter’s chill and the grasses rise from their slumbers. Bluejoint grass. Switchgrass.

An agrostrologist. That’s someone who studies grasses, plants in the family Poaceae. I looked it up on my phone as I walked the prairie paths.

Poets are fond of grass. I am no poet, though I write poetry. There are lines along the trail made from tamped grasses and reeds. There is verse everywhere, made of stems and sheaths.

“The grass divides as with a comb—a spotted shaft is seen—and then it closes at your feet and opens further on.” This, from Emily Dickinson, a woman who rarely left her house in Amherst, Massachusetts, but knew what it was like to have a world open to you if you allow it.

I leave my house almost every day to spend some time with marsh leaves, marsh shrubs, marsh grasses. Canada wild rye. Prairie cordgrass.

Winter is not a time of death, rather of getting ready for life to continue unbound, limitless. Winter reminds us of coming renewal; reminds us that everything rebounds, rebuilds, continues, grows, blooms wildly and untamed.

Big Bluestem

The grass known as big bluestem (Andropogon gerardii) is called the “king of the prairie.” It can grow taller than all of us. It has roots that can reach down ten feet. Some folks might think it’s a plain plant, a plain plant on the plains. But, it is host to the larvae of butterflies: the rare byssus skipper, the common wood nymph. The grass is a womb for colorful living origami that dances on the air.

“Ah! How good to see,” wrote Oscar Wilde, “grass-girdled spring in her joy and laughing greenery.”

Take heart, those who are eager for winter to end with an eye toward summer’s warmth. No matter what is happening here at the marsh that I walk (barren trees and songless skies) something good is always happening (births and rebirths).

We are always a witness to the Earth’s spirit. Whitman: “I loafe and invite my soul; I lean and loafe at my ease, observing a spear of summer grass.”

Let that spear penetrate you, even for a few minutes during your busy Madison days. Invite it into your soul. "I am the grass; I cover all."