#NewThisDay Writing From My Photo Stream
May 18, 2018
Kelly DuMar
Bluets
Today the dogs and I walked in the very cool morning with a friend through the grounds of the old Medfield State Hospital and into the meadows and woods. We came across this cheerful patch of bluets.
As individual flowers the bluets are so inconspicuous that few people notice them. But they colonize, and vast patches of their white or pale lilac blossoms are like frost on the grass in upland meadows. . .
One of the particular charms of bluets is that they bloom in May and they are hosts to a number of the smaller butterflies, the sulphurs and the fritillaries, as well as to the bees. Find a patch of bluets and you can listen to bees as happy as they will be in a June field of clover and you can watch those little butterflies skip and glide and sip and dine. Somehow it makes one feel that the drone of summer is not too far away while'the gentleness of spring is still all around. Confidentially, bluets aren't much as flowers; but as an essential part of May they are beautiful, and unforgettable.
Unforgettable Bluets SPECIAL TO THE NEW YORK TIMESMAY 21, 1972
And then, tonight, I find a poem about bluets that the speaker finds by a lake, still in bloom in October, by James Schulyer at the Poetry Foundation :
So small,
a drop of sky that
splashed and held,
four-petaled, creamy
in its throat.
From "The Bluets," by James Schulyer
All photos and text ©Kelly DuMar 2018, unless otherwise attributed.