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.