File:Hart's Tongues (2978765410).jpg

Photographed on St Mary's, Isles of Scilly.

HART'S TONGUE

The dry-stone wall is dripping after rain, and campions hang their pendulous heads, under water droplets, that magnify the many eyes of spiders making loving gesticulations. Ivies climb here, roots probing like worms; green flowers leave the air slick with nectar.

And spent rain falls in world- reflecting globes, and in runnels, down these dark and fleshy leaves, as though they had been waxed.

No wonder the Namers always call them tongues, whether of harts or horses, foxes or lambs, for the rain is now their slaver, and the stone-crack’s leer lets them out to lap around the corners of the day, to taste the rising humours of the mould.

                    There is more flesh

here, than in many louder tongues.

Source material: The Hart’s Tongue Fern, Phyllitis scolopendrium, has a number of folk names which allude to its fleshy quality, including Hind’s Tongue, Fox Tongue, Lamb’s Tongue, Horse’s Tongue, and, in competition with another plant in this collection, Adder’s Tongue. It is also called the Seaweed Fern in Surrey on account of its resemblance to Laminaria. The Greeks were reminded of centipedes by the undersides of its fronds, with their parallel lines of sori; hence its specific name. See Edward Step, Wayside and Woodland Ferns, p. 60. On the Isles of Scilly they grow in profusion, sprouting both from the ground, and from cracks and crevices in rocks and walls.

Poem by Giles Watson, 2004.

For more of my poems on ferns, see: