The Sun Underfoot Among The Sundews poem – Amy Clampitt poems | Poems and Poetry

An ingenuity too astonishing

to be quite fortuitous is

this bog full of sundews, sphagnum-

lined and shaped like a teacup.

A step

down and you’re into it; a

wilderness swallows you up:

ankle-, then knee-, then midriff-

to-shoulder-deep in wetfooted

understory, an overhead

spruce-tamarack horizon hinting

you’ll never get out of here.

But the sun

among the sundews, down there,

is so bright, an underfoot

webwork of carnivorous rubies,

a star-swarm thick as the gnats

they’re set to catch, delectable

double-faced cockleburs, each

hair-tip a sticky mirror

afire with sunlight, a million

of them and again a million,

each mirror a trap set to

unhand believing,

that either

a First Cause said once, “Let there

be sundews,” and there were, or they’ve

made their way here unaided

other than by that backhand, round-

about refusal to assume responsibility

known as Natural Selection.

But the sun

underfoot is so dazzling

down there among the sundews,

there is so much light

in that cup that, looking,

you start to fall upward.