This is excellant as usual. Margaret. You have a vivid imagination. I like 
the title and how you use colours so vividly. The only crit I would have is 
that there are almost two poems here,one about the dandelions and the other 
about the mushrooms. It is almost a poem within a poem. I do think it has 
much potential as two poems. Your writing always makes me realise my short 
commings as you are so imaginative with that element of truth which makes a 
lot of your poems very believable.
best wishes sally j


>From: grasshopper <[log in to unmask]>
>Reply-To: The Pennine Poetry Works <[log in to unmask]>
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: New sub: The Mushroom Effect
>Date: Thu, 8 Feb 2007 21:41:21 -0000
>
>.........The Mushroom Effect
>'Isn't it strange, my husband said, that heliotrope
>is purple, when it sounds so golden. Even so, I am drawn
>to the dusky shades.' He asked the stationer to find
>some heliotrophe ink--eventually the man mixed it up himself,
>from blue and crimson and a tincture of black.
>That night I had been ill--I didn't like to say it
>but I blamed in on the dish of wild mushrooms
>gathered in the fields. He's so easily distracted.
>The dandelions the French call pissenlit,
>he calls ghosts of sun in moonlight, though
>I was taught the botanical name. Father rolled
>
>the syllables off his tongue,Taraxacum offinicale
>and split the stem to show the seeping juice like milk.
>Pissabeds, rustics call them, for their diuretic grace.
>Their roots can be roasted and ground and brewed
>like coffee. And the fragile clock, the head, a mass
>of seeds poised on quivering filaments, so delicately
>attached, like the full round of the mind, like sanity.
>One breath and it scatters on the wind.
>
>But the cook sanctioned the mushrooms
>with a dainty sauce of orange and cream
>so tempting that I swallowed the fungal slivers
>almost before I realised they were on my tongue.
>And then my belly woke me in the night, bubbling
>like a kettle. I used the chamberpot, then wrapped
>the quilt around me, found paper and pen and wrote.
>My ink was plain navy blue. My nib rode on my words
>like a yawl on an Atlantic swell.
>
>I wrote of a wood where trees were branched flesh
>over pale hoods of fly agaric, Amanita muscaria,
>and of a woman with eyes instead of nipples.
>My nightmare terrified them all that evening.
>I thought perhaps I should send my husband out again
>with the old oak trug to gather his ambiguous harvest.
>Art, I realise, requires risks, consumption
>of the secret sunless things. Now I often dream
>of dandelion seeds drifting over water, swept
>back to the shore like small winged spirits,
>pale and mute, never finding sanctuary.
>
>
>
>  (M.A.Griffiths)

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