Mushrooms

This gravely gravid plantwise shelter
is for the spores of something massive,
an underground intelligence
stretching coast to coast on motorways
of magic, roads of doom
for all of us not attuned to beta particles.

We could not last a war,
or post ourselves across the world
to break down all the fetid, rotting ground
we walk on.
We could not die and yet survive asleep
amongst the humus.

These mushrooms walk and talk,
as Angels on a pin they dance;
so many millions in your breath,
hearing all the infra sound,
the wilderness of plant-life music,
the orchestra of entomology.

We could eat nothing but them;
fungi with every meal or snack,
and yet they would outlast us,
bright and white and warning
of the poisons in them, on them;
A single mind; the middle kingdom.

Of course anyone with an ounce of memory of what I have written before will know which poem inspired this, though of course I don't pretend that is anywhere near as good as that.

I didn't realise it, but although there ARE three kingdoms, they are Plant, Animal and Mineral. I always thought that Fungi were one on their own. Maybe, that is what one radical taxonomist suggested. Anyway, in this small world, fungi ARE the third kingdom and will remain so. So what about Protozoa you ask. I had to do a biology project on protozoa once and fascinating little beasties they are. We used to collect the pond water to look at the pond-life through the microscope along with the scrapings from the inside of our cheeks. It was when my brother suggested that we look at blood and MY blood to boot, I decided against any further investigation. I don't recall either of us going down with dysentry or typhoid from playing in the water but as it was filtered off the Malvern Hills, it was probably quite clean. My mother once said something about COLD water being bad for you but nothing about dirty water and she was a doctor so we did trust her. We are still here.