by Jim Krosschell
It arrived in the baggage
of the Puritans,
and spread as they did.
Wherever they dug a road
or slashed a wood,
there it grew, weedy.
But Maliseet and Cree
learned to eat its leaves,
to apply them as a salve
to wounds they suffered.
Plantago major
became a useful citizen,
naturalized to the New World,
unlike those who brought it in.
Jim Krosschell’s poems and essays have appeared in some 70 journals, and he has published two essay collections: One Man's Maine, which won a Maine Literary Award, and Owls Head Revisited. He lives in Northport, ME and Newton, MA, and is Board President of the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance.