This week’s poem holds an image of new spring blooms but also imagery of the past, death and melancholy. In Myronn Hardy’s beautiful lyric poem “Bluebells,” I find a reminder that springtime is not all ease and release: the transition away from winter and dark can sometimes have its difficult or bittersweet moments, and we are often not done grieving even as we keep moving forward toward the light.
Myronn Hardy’s most recent book of poems, Radioactive Starlings, was published by Princeton University Press (2017). His poems have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Ploughshares, the Virginia Quarterly Review, the Baffler, and elsewhere. He teaches at Bates College.
Bluebells
By Myronn Hardy
break from the tawny grass flattened
with winter’s weight. I’m afraid
as I stare at them their ending foreseen.
I’m walking down Bartlett Street.
Whirls of dust skeletal leaves
surround embrace what they cannot
lift take somewhere else.
A god has not died
but something godlike
has is slowly.
Take this free hand in a field
of bluebells. As the basilica
bells chime let us continue
our walk mourning what
has is being undone.
Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “Bluebells,” copyright by Myronn Hardy, appears here by permission of the author.
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