Issue 25 Editor’s Pick: ‘Lichen’ by Mary Mulholland
Ellen Brown connects relationships and identity through the diversity of lichens.
When I read the title, I assumed Mary Mulholland’s “Lichen” was a poem about an organism I have come to know well from living in northeastern Minnesota. Our clean air and boreal forests support a remarkable diversity of lichens, and I love to scout new species while I’m hiking. But what I discovered after reading “Lichen” is that, at its heart, it is really a poem about relationships and identity.
Mulholland introduces this idea in the first stanza, describing lichen as a “lasting / relationship” that becomes “more / than the sum of its parts,” blurring the idea of being “individual.” As the poem unfolds, what initially appears to be a biology lesson gradually becomes something much more personal.
The poem is written in three stanzas, with each new idea building on the one before it. The first stanza begins with observation and establishes the chronology of a personal loss, only we don’t know that yet: “Afterwards I see lichen everywhere, / learn how it answers to many names: / gold dust, reindeer-moss.”
The second stanza uses the language of science to deepen our understanding of how lichen forms through collaboration: “Alga, fungus – symbiotic, giving / and taking—autotroph, heterotroph.”
In the final stanza, we are given the emotional context. The speaker arrives at the memory of her sister, brought to mind by the image of her sister’s garden where “lichen veils / the birch tree where we scattered / her ashes” and “laces the stone
wall / where she fed robins and bluetits / with crumbs from her toaster.” Here, lichen becomes more than an organism; it becomes a metaphor for understanding loss.
From a scientific perspective, lichens challenge our ideas about individuality. They are partnerships between a fungus and an alga (or sometimes cyanobacteria) that live so closely together that they become something that neither could become on its own. Mulholland’s poem suggests that perhaps our closest human relationships work that way, too.
As I sat with this poem, I started to consider the countless ways we are made by one another, especially by those closest to us. How, over time, we absorb one another’s habits, memories, perspectives, and ways of seeing until the boundaries between “you” and “me” become blurred by the shared life that we make together.
So what does it mean to lose someone whose presence in your life helped shape you?
That question lingers in the poem’s final line: “Too / late, how little I knew,” sentiments that express regret for a sister now gone and remind us how easy it is to underestimate the interdependence of the relationships closest to us.
The speaker learned the names of lichens, their biology, and their ecological significance, and, in the process, gained a new understanding of her relationship with her sister. For me, this is what makes “Lichen” such a powerful poem. It shows how collaboration between science and poetry can lead to a deeper understanding of ourselves and our relationships with one another.
Ellen Brown is a science writer and bird artist based in Duluth, Minnesota, who combines fine art and nature writing to support bird conservation. She holds a BA in Environmental Studies from the University of Minnesota and an MA in Science Writing from Johns Hopkins University. She previously served as nonfiction editor for Delmarva Review and currently reviews science poetry for Consilience. Learn more at www.EllenBrownArts.com