Herbalist's Shadow

Lyrics

No headstone marks your place.
No entry in the book of Sudbury names.
Just this patch of earth.

The mint still rages by the fieldstone wall.
A fugitive from your garden, two hundred winters past.
Your mortar, found beside the well,
sits on a windowsill, a hollow in the stone
worn smooth by a hand I cannot trace.
They wrote down the deeds, the births, the fines.
The sale of land, the felling of the trees.
But not the name of the woman who knew
which root would calm a fever in the dark.

You are the herbalist's shadow.
A cool place on a summer afternoon.
Your knowledge never written, only grown.
In the stubborn yarrow by the road,
in the comfrey pushing through the frost.
Your name is wind, your monument is green.

I picture you at dusk, your basket full.
Elderflower for the cough, plantain for the sting.
Your apron stained with chlorophyll and dirt.
The attic heavy with the scent of drying tansy,
a bitter perfume against the final cold.
Each bundle tied with twine, a quiet prayer
hung from the rafters, waiting for a cry,
a fall, a winter's rasping breath.
This was your science and your art.

You are the herbalist's shadow.
A cool place on a summer afternoon.
Your knowledge never written, only grown.
In the stubborn yarrow by the road,
in the comfrey pushing through the frost.
Your name is wind, your monument is green.

We walk the conservation land and praise the wild.
But we don't see the ghost of your kitchen plot
in the clump of thyme that smells of another country,
or the mullein standing sentinel, a weed to us,
a lung-healer to you.
Your shadow stretches longer than the oak's.
It falls across our modern lives,
unseen, unthanked, essential.

Sage. Chamomile. Mint.
Your shadow.
Your garden breathes.