Ten Poems about Herbs

‘Instead of a Card’

Pamphlets are supplied with an envelope for posting and a bookmark for a special message. Whether you’re choosing for a friend or for yourself, we think you’ll find you’re spoilt for choice.

We love herbs for their fragrance and for their taste. They can be food or medicine or perfume. In these beguiling poems, it seems that herbs have other powers too; they can remind us of the past and they can make us think of love – sometimes both at the same time:

“For the cold will come, though you turn to me soon,
Your eyes going serious green from hazel,
Your quick hand on my face the scent of basil.”

from ‘Basil’ by Gibbons Ruark

Elsewhere we encounter mint and basil growing by a roadside in the Mediterranean, garden marjoram covered in bees and the headiness of wild garlic in an English woodland. Wherever they grow, herbs seem to stop us in our tracks, asking us to bend to pick a stem or simply to rub their scent onto our fingers.

Perhaps this is what herbs are for: to make time stand still as we pause for a moment to wonder at their wild beauty.

Poems by Maggie Anderson, Sujata Bhatt, Jane Burn, Jim Daniels, Isobel Dixon, John Fuller, Lyn Lifshin, Alfred Noyes, Gibbons Ruark and Robert Seatter.

Cover illustration by Sara Boccaccini Meadows.