If her woods turn as dark as her mother’s, I’ll rue what I’ve taught her.
This child too young to tie her shoes knows oyster, morel, chanterelle.
She knows foxfire glows a warning — jack o’lanterns aren’t for eating — 
and she puts nothing in her mouth I have not checked. 
She minds the rules. She wants to stay alive. 

At home we have a safe now but a forest steps away, and it’s there 
I find her fashioning a fairy house from the most potent poison
she knows: a Destroying Angel sheltering her whole family 
of acorn-faced pixies with beech leaf wings. Snow white, poised, 
I’m afraid I can see why she’d choose it. 

As lethal on the tongue as the barrel of a gun this one grows wild, 
unlockable, unpermitted. Luminescent in a lightless gully, 
from the dank leaf litter a seraph rises unsullied 
and spreads her immaculate wings. Holy, holy terror. 
How it shines.