Poem Renaissance – Louhi Pohjola

Gyroscope Review is celebrating National Poetry Month with a Poem Renaissance, a review of previously published poems looking for new life and new views. Every day through May 20^th, a new poem to fall in love with all over again.

Tiny Landscapes
by Louhi Pohjola

I fly, hawk-like,
and look down

the river over
a pink countryside landscape

and a graceful estuary
with sandbanks
as if it were low tide.

Wing shaped river islands
dot the waterway

and on the south side,
the arrangement of cells
is a calm, orderly queue.

The hematoxylin and eosin stains
reveal nuclei and cytoplasm

that line the ducts,
chaste and placid.

Swinging north, I cross
the river and hover
over a different sort of landscape,
one with a frenetic feel
where cells are densely packed.
I swoop down low
until I float above a spit of land
that, from the shore, spreads
into the river where serpentine chromosomes
on spindle fibers choreograph cell division. Some
dividing cells are much larger than others.
The lakes here have pulled up
their beaches and now
have a jagged look.
No longer are vistas
of river deltas, marshes, and
atolls visible, but
only mayhem on that slice
of your breast
beneath the lens.

This poem won an award in the Oregon Poetry Association's fall (2024) competition, and was published in their review, Verseweavers.

Louhi Pohjola was born in Montreal, Canada, to Finnish immigrant parents. She was a cell and molecular biologist before teaching sciences and humanities in a small high school in southern Oregon. She tends to write poems focused on the intersections of human behavior and the natural world, in particular, with black holes, the cosmos, and octopi. She is an avid fly-fisherwoman and river rock connoisseur. Louhi lives in Portland, Oregon, with her husband and her temperamental terrier. The latter thinks that he is a cat.

Don’t forget to read the Spring 2025 Issue, available now, online and in print

Previous Renaissance Poets

April Poets

May Poets