How to Survive a Lightning Strike

Translation of the Latin text at the top
of the print: "I begin to blossom gorgeously 
out of the fluids of disintegration."

Translation of the Dutch poem in the lower section:  
"Secret growth,/ legacy of the night,/ spongily I rise,/
a serene beauty."
                                           ~ "Toadstool," M.C. Escher,
                                               XXIV Emblemata, 1931



There was the year she mistook 
a lump of coal for the light of the moon, 
a shiver of fish scales for dowry. There was 
the year she lost both the deed to a piece 
of land and a name she once thought could be 
hers. The bangles women clasped over her wrists 
slid into the mud; the chains that corded her neck 
rusted in rain. But spores knew how to map
the shadow of dead or dying forests— poplar 
and pine, elm, ash. They rinsed her hair in the damp, 
filtered light of the woods. They took from her mouth 
the taste of what she could no longer love, replacing it 
first with boils then bird-bills; then showing her 
what lightning carved into the bodies of trees.