Bluebells

IN AND OUT, THE DANCING BLUEBIRD

is how we refashioned
a children’s rhyme

I haven’t thought about in years—
Loose ring of girls sitting
on the blacktop, uniform skirts

of navy tucked carefully around
brown knees, chanting
as one of us— It, decoy,

unwitting sacrifice— wove in
and out, eluding pursuit
until caught. So far removed

from the northern hemisphere,
we did not know then
about the long-stalked campanula,

the rounded, heart-shaped bells,
heads that bowed along each
panicle’s length on grassy prairies,

amid the rocks, on dusty roadsides—
With each plaintive refrain,
Tappity tappity on my shoulder, who

will be my master? always
I imagine the trembling
bird, its little show of bravura,

its bid for more than commerce
in a world of stricken
webs. And the chosen ones

have little choice but carry on.
Did I think then how much
of this required unhoming,

a loosing into the periphery?
Who’ll want a wild bird more
than a weed that will grow

on any bit of tufted soil? Take me,
says the tapping at the window;
Choose me, says the tapping

on the sill—voice like a faded thread
of slender blue I lose and find
and lose, over and over without end.

(Hyacinthoides non-scripta)

Published in the February 2015 issue of ONE
http://one.jacarpress.com

***

Luisa A. Igloria‘s most recent publications include Ode to the Heart Smaller than a Pencil Eraser (selected by Mark Doty for the 2014 May Swenson Prize, Utah State University Press) and Night Willow: Prose Poems (Phoenicia Publishing, Montreal, 2014); as well as the eChapbook Bright as Mirrors Left in the Grass (Kudzu House Press/Kudzu House Review, March 2015). She directs the MFA Creative Writing Program at Old Dominion University.