LOUHI POHJOLA

*The Starry Night* (1889) by Vincent Van Gogh.

To Vincent

If you returned from Arles,

with its haystacks and flowered fields,

how would you paint these times?

Would specks of lead-white oil alight

on the flowering almond twig,

the curled tips of cypresses, ashy hues

dotting the twisted pines?

Would you edge sunflowers with soot,

paint more crows, secrets

in their cinder-clotted feathers,

over cornfields flattened by smoke?

Would you swirl a yellow bruise over

ivory clouds, tint the air blood-orange?

Would you suffuse the sun with a lavender

tinge, outline the moon with vermillion?

Could you paint a night sky without stars?

Section of The Starry Night (1889) by Vincent Van Gogh.

Louhi Pohjola’s poetry is informed by her background as a cell and molecular biologist, and she tends to write poems focused on the intersections of human behaviour and the natural world. She is an avid fly-fisherwoman and river rock connoisseur. Louhi is the 2025 featured artist in the Carl Jung Institute of Los Angeles’ publication, Psychological Perspectives. Her chapbook, Cracking Open the Bones, was the 2025 winner of the Elyse Wolf Chapbook Contest from Slate Roof Press.