A poem about bells that opens by admitting their ringing "isn't obvious" is already asking for a particular kind of reader. Dave Bonta's "Fairy Bells," subtitled with the Latin name *Prosartes lanuginosa*, describes a shy flower hidden among leaves. Its real subject is how to notice things, and what a flower gives up in order to go on.
The first stanza sets up the poem's gentle joke. The flowers are bells, so they ought to ring, yet the only listener who could hear them is "an anchorite," a hermit who has chosen silence and solitude. The word carries a whole atmosphere of patience and devotion, and it quietly links the bell image to monastic life. Finding this flower, the poem suggests, is less a walk than a discipline.
What follows reads like instructions, with its imperatives "Listen" and "Look." Listening comes first, but the poem does not hand us the bells' sound. It offers the sounds around them: "water tricking under rocks," where the word hovers between trickling and tricking, as if the stream were hiding something, and the "five wheezy notes" of a black-throated green warbler. "Wheezy" is a lovely, unglamorous choice. Bonta doesn't dress the birdsong up as music. These are small, honest noises, a way of tuning the ear before the eye takes over. Then the poem turns to looking, and the language turns tactile and angular: "creased leaves," "zigzag branches," the ampersand like a quick pen stroke. The flower appears as "a bell of quiet yellow-green." Applying "quiet" to a colour is the poem's key move. It solves the puzzle of the opening by suggesting that these bells ring through the eyes, so that seeing and hearing blur together.
The form is as unshowy as the flower. There are five tercets in free verse, with no rhyme and short lines. Sentences keep spilling over the stanza breaks, and the white space does expressive work. "A bell of quiet yellow-green" ends a stanza, and the flare, "that flares into a six-pointed star," arrives only after a pause, as if the flower were opening in the gap. The dash after "stout style—" holds the breath before the poem's turn. Instead of rhyme, Bonta uses clusters of sound. "Stout style" and "six-pointed star" crowd together hard s and t sounds, and "creased," "zigzag" and "scarlet clapper" are full of clicking k and z sounds. The words themselves seem to chime lightly.
That precise, almost botanical vocabulary ("anthers facing outward / around a stout style") makes the next line more striking: "all of which must drop away." After the delicate star, the poem is blunt, and the word "must" makes the loss a necessity, not a tragedy. The petals and anthers vanish "to swell the bell's heir." "Heir" is a family word, so the flower becomes a parent making way for what comes next. Judging by the imagery, the "scarlet clapper" is the fruit that follows, and the metaphor completes itself neatly. A bell is useless without a clapper, yet this bell only gets its clapper once the bell itself has dropped away. The poem ends on its loudest colour. After "quiet yellow-green," scarlet is a shout, though Bonta never says it rings. He leaves us to hear it, which is the skill the anchorite was supposed to have.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does in so little space. It teaches attention as a kind of devotion, mixing the language of science and the language of spiritual practice without any strain between them. It also offers a quietly moving idea about endings. What looks like loss, the star-shaped flower falling away, is really a handover, and the poem's last image looks forward. A reader who has followed the instructions to listen, to look and to wait is rewarded with a small, bright surprise.