Flower seeds to sow now! Cineraria?
Launch the tiny vessels holding freight so fair,
Butterfly delphiniums in their capes of blue,
Marigold-dissenters of an orange hue!
Stocks of Old Virginia, mauve and pink and white,
Making sweet a garden old by day and night;
Such a grey old garden terraced to the sea,
With the land wind bringing many a lucky bee;
Fussing its gold pit, staking out a claim;
Viola and pansy, gillyflower of flame!
Sun among the larkspurs, vain and ruffling things,
Slim, usurping pages in the cloaks of kings!
Cornflowers, shy plebeians coming up to town,
From the country meadows, in a Sunday gown!
Oriental poppies, wonderfully dressed,
As a languid beauty by a king caressed.
Heavy with some secret no one ever tells,
Swing to silent music Canterbury bells;
While among the grasses, tasselled and unshorn,
Of the Wind and Sunshine, many a rhyme is born!
Far off sails like silver on the silver seas,
One brown island rising to a crest of trees;
Or the hunchbacked wavelets, sighing up the sand,
Passion for the roses, married to the land!
Do I own a garden lying by the sea?
Do I dream a garden grown by witchery?
No, my sleeping beauty, into life you're kist
Only by magic of the seedsman's list!
First published in The Australasian, 13 July 1918
