Emily Pauline Johnson (1861–1913) — known also by her Mohawk stage name, Tekahionwake — toured her native Canada and the United States as what we might now call a performance poet, whose act turned on her mixed indigenous and European ancestry, with changes of costume to highlight aspects of her identity. While her poems and short stories frequently drew on themes related to North American indigenous history and experience, today’s Poem of the Day illustrates Johnson’s keen eye for the natural world, as well as her lyric impulse to connect its dramas with something human. In two pentameter quintains with an ababa rhyme scheme, “Fire Flowers” observes the renewal instigated by a forest fire or by the interior cataclysm of grief.

Fire-Flowers 
by Emily Pauline Johnson 

And only where the forest fires have sped,  
  Scorching relentlessly the cool north lands, 
A sweet wild flower lifts its purple head,  
And, like some gentle spirit sorrow-fed, 
  It hides the scars with almost human hands. 

And only to the heart that knows of grief, 
  Of desolating fire, of human pain, 
There comes some purifying sweet belief,  
Some fellow-feeling beautiful, if brief. 
  And life revives, and blossoms once again. 

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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems will be typically drawn from the lesser-known portion of the history of English verse. In the coming months we will be reaching out to contemporary poets for examples of current, primarily formalist work, to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.