Author’s note: I first shared this poem on 8 May 2026, during the beginning of the dispute over my writing for Alla kan blomstra and its use in the collaboration with UN-Habitat.
Nine days earlier, I had been instructed by Åland’s government administration not to contact UN-Habitat or the lead author of the international white paper. My authorship was being denied while I was being told not to speak to the people who could help establish it. The cowslip was already part of the visual language of my work on human flourishing. Its roots and flowers carried the ideas I had spent so much time developing: what sustains us, what allows us to grow, what makes flourishing possible.
When my four year old son Matthias brought me those flowers, he knew nothing of the correspondence or the struggle over whose work it was. He had found something beautiful and wanted his mother to have it. That is why the flowers came to bear witness. They returned me to the beginnings of the work, and to my own knowledge of what I had made. “What is rooted remembers” was about the life and labour a work carries within it, even when its author’s place in the story is denied. The poem holds that struggle alongside the ordinary love that continued to reach me in the middle of it. The blessing at the end was for the road ahead.
I did not yet know how long it would be.
The week the cowslips returned,
my son brought them to me
with dirt on his mouth
and light in his eyes.
He did not know
what they had come to witness.
Only that they were yellow,
and alive,
and worth carrying home to his mother.
Small bells of spring,
keys from the field,
they stood between us
like grace made visible.
Not soft grace.
Not surrender.
The kind that rises
after frost,
after silence,
after being pressed
beneath the weight of a heavier season.
They did not argue.
They did not accuse.
They simply opened
in the palm of a child
who still believed
flowers belong
to the one who finds them beautiful.
And I understood:
truth does not always arrive
with thunder.
Sometimes it comes
barefoot,
laughing,
with muddy cheeks
and a fistful of blooms.
The cowslips had returned
not to comfort me,
but to bear witness.
To say:
what is living knows itself.
What is rooted remembers.
What is given in innocence
still carries power.
And in that small golden hour,
before the world could name it,
before anyone could claim it,
spring leaned close
and wished me well
for the times ahead.
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