Bluets

I woke to bluets on the church lawn

one morning, barefoot in dew and

babydoll. From where did the 

blue throats come, sprung cluster 

in sod at the foot 

of the white mon-

olith? from 

earth, from

God?

 

About the Poem:

This poem is a “nonet,” a nine-line poem beginning with nine syllables and decreasing by one syllable per line thereafter. I’m interested in the inverse relationship between the form and the subject matter: as the lines narrow, the subject matter gets bigger. My father was a Congregational minister, and the parsonage of my childhood was in rural CT, with a short walk up the hill to the church. I was always so surprised at the spring arrival of bluets, which appear seemingly out of nowhere. How did they get there? I was probably trying to reconcile the science I was learning in school with the religion I was learning at home. Of course you can tell from the grownup word “monolith” that I still have questions. 

About the Poet: 

Joanna Solfrian is the author of the poetry collections Temporary Beast, The Second Perfect Number, The Mud Room, and Visible Heavens, which was chosen by Naomi Shihab Nye for the Wick First Book Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in The Harvard Review, Boulevard, Rattle, Margie, The Southern Review, Salamander, Pleiades, Image, and elsewhere. She is a MacDowell Fellow and a six-time Pushcart nominee. Joanna lives and works in New York City. www.joannasolfrian.com