Fern Canyon – a poem by Pat McCutcheon

Fern Canyon

Beneath towering big leaf maples,
huckleberries tempt me with their translucent red.
A salmon berry’s bumpy 
bright orange pricks my fingers.
Beside delicate maidenhair fern,
I wander the cobbled stream bed 
lined with dusty sword ferns.
Spring proclaimed by snowy trillium.

I walked here fifty years ago
holding my mom’s freckled hand,
carrying my infant son on my chest.
Moved by the hallowed sound 
of our family’s footsteps,
I called this place a cathedral.
Now she is gone and his son is cherished.
I find myself consecrated anew
in this lush dwelling of the holy.

Now retired from teaching as a community college English professor, and having raised three children, Pat McCutcheon and her wife live in the redwoods of far northern California. Her poems have appeared in California Quarterly, Fish Poetry Prize Anthology , Pisgah Review, Ship of Fools, Sinister Wisdom, and other journals and anthologies. In 2015 her chapbook Slipped Past Words, was published as a winner by Finishing Line Press. Her debut collection, Through the Labyrinth, was published in 2023.