Two Poems by Lisa Baird
Permission
The stinging nettle patch behind the house
greens up earlier than roadside or river
nettle. A romantic gesture from a partner
who planted them for me even though
he doesn’t like the sting, wears thick gloves
to gather them for tea, gets nervous in late
summer when the entire nettle patch leans out
tall and heavy over the walkway. But that comes
later. This morning they were barely four inches.
Urtica dioica. Little poem of a name: burn of two
houses. I finally looked up the pronunciation.
Dye-OH-ick-a. Hot ancient hum on my bare
hands at harvesting, taught me to ask
permission. May I take some? May I take more?
Thank you. Keeper of the good fire, green-
arrowed signature written into wet earth,
each year since moving back I’ve said This might
be the most beautiful spring yet and I said it
again this May, and meant it, despite everything,
despite it being the first spring I’d rubbed nettle
on my skin, seeking the sting — May I? — just
to feel something.
Echolocation
I say hello in the parking lot to someone finishing up
at the community garden. They say I thought I was the only one
weird enough to be out here this late, loading tools into their trunk.
I’m here for the meteor showers, I tell them.
Did you know there are three different types of twilight?
Civil. Then nautical. And, just before full night, astronomical.
It clouds over as soon as I lie down in the field.
A blur of bats wing above in the overcast gloom, bouncing
their voices off insects, trees. I try to listen when people
explain how space and time are the interconnected fabric of the universe
or how our every atom originated from the flaming gaseous core
of a star—born in the belly of a supernova—but I get distracted
by how poetic it all is. I’m letting go of everyone who loved me
once but doesn’t anymore. If that sounds sad, it’s not.
For one leaping moment I see bright movement behind a thin patch
of cloud. But it’s just a plane, blinking its way
to somewhere. The bats cry out, alert to the shapes of prey, of other bats,
attuned to the symmetry of their own returning voice.
If I hardly have time to see my friends anymore, & we can’t touch
when I do, am I still me? Everything I write now contains
this distance. The pitch & tilt of it like a field where I sing out to the dark
to learn where I am, watching the soft-bodied swoop
of the bats that eat the mosquitos that have bitten me, my blood
moving & warm in us all.
Lisa Baird is a queer writer and community acupuncturist living on Attawandaron/Chonnonton/Mississaugas of the New Credit territory (Guelph ON). Her poetry has appeared in various journals, has been shortlisted for the 2020 Room Magazine Poetry Contest and longlisted for the 2020 CBC Poetry Prize. Her first book, Winter’s Cold Girls (Caitlin Press, 2019) was shortlisted for the 2020 Relit Award for poetry. She is building a new collection of poems. Find her online at her website.