Who’d have thought there could be winter flowers?
Northerners like me would count it folly,
Wanting more than evergreen and holly.
Peonies and red agave towers,
Sprays of wintersweet and ume showers,
Japanese camellias, striped and jolly,
Undercut the wintry melancholy.
Snow-on-bloom a subtler faith empowers.
Strengthened now, I tackle an enigma
Of a higher order: saintly sinner,
Righteous failure, wholly holy misfit;
Baby in the manger, God incarnate;
Crucified forsaken cosmic winner;
Stumbling foolishness, the great kerygma.
(Words and photos by Sarah Hinlicky Wilson. This poem is a Petrarchan sonnet, which means it logically breaks down into an octave and a sestet, unlike in a Shakespearean sonnet, which breaks down into 12 lines followed by a couplet. Also, instead of being in the usual iambic pentameter—ta-TUM ta-TUM ta-TUM ta-TUM ta-TUM—this poem is in trochaic pentameter—TUM-ta TUM-ta TUM-ta TUM-ta TUM-ta. That choice was dictated by the first line, which came to me in one piece. All the flowers shown here bloom in Tokyo through the winter months.)