Crocus

A first outing last night for my talk on "The Poetry of Flowers" - at Carno Garden Club, reading poems by Clare, Wordsworth, Roethke, Rossetti, Edward Thomas and others, plus a few of my own, this one included :-

I had forgotten I had planted corms beneath a shading tree
on that Friday in September when you came to visit me,
with the summer almost over, and the shortening of the days,
and the news you had to give me of the parting of our ways.

That winter was a long one, with the ground hard under frost,
and the cold north wind sang mourning songs for all that I had lost;
every day so dark and dismal, every vista sad and grey,
what need for light or colour with you still so far away?

Till a day dawned bright with birdsong, and a new warmth in the sun,
and a new hope in my heart, as if I’d only just begun;
I stepped into the garden, and it was a joy to see
the crocus, gold and purple, flowering underneath that tree.

Through all the winter world, beneath its dark and sombre skies,
her shoots had grown in secret, like a love that never dies;
her early alleluia, bright with shining drops of rain,
my promise of the spring, and that you’d soon be back again.