Water Lettuce
by Caroline Mellor
The water lettuce has thick, spongy leaves
and is covered in fine hairs.
Its roots hang free
so it is not anchored to the ground.
(I know this because David Attenborough tells me so,
his blue eyes twinkling
like fresh water).
I think of all the unmoored souls on the planet,
cast adrift, roots
severed or cut.
Not anchored in place.
Those who, like me, feel the loss of connection
to ancestral home and wisdom,
to themselves.
The water lettuce has some remarkable adaptations,
says David.
Its free-floating roots mean it can travel.
What a beautiful teaching, I thought,
for anyone whose roots have been torn up,
for anyone who finds family
to be a place of wounding
rather than of anchoring.
To know that they can travel the flooded rivers
and the great highways of life
gathering all the minerals and nutrients they need
from the water
as they go;
to know that, like the water lettuce, being rootless,
they too have one more remarkable adaptation.
Says Sir David:
They are more or less unsinkable.
Nice images
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