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| GRAY are the gardens of our Celtic lands, | |
| Dreaming and gray, | |
| Tended by the devotion of pale hands, | |
| On barren crags, or by disastrous sands, | |
| That night and day | 5 |
| Are drenched with bitter spray. | |
| There rosemary and thyme are plentiful, | |
| Larkspur that lovers cull, | |
| Love-in-the-mist that is most sorrowful. | |
| Flowers so wistful that our teardrops start…. | 10 |
| Scarcely one understands that regal, rare, | |
| Bravely the tiger lily blossoms there, | |
| Bravely apart. | |
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| Our gardens are enamored of the spring, | |
| Of silver rain, | 15 |
| The cloudy green of buds slow-burgeoning, | |
| The sorrow of last apple blooms that cling | |
| And are not fain | |
| To yield their fruit again. | |
| We do not long for tropic pageantry, | 20 |
| Yet surge with love to see | |
| The tiger lily’s muted ecstasy. | |
| Watered by mist and lashed by wind-blown rime, | |
| She is no alien thing; but vivid, free, | |
| She has no heed for paler rosemary, | 25 |
| Larkspur or thyme. | |
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| It is in vain they worship her who knows | |
| Pity nor pride. | |
| Their petals whirl down every wind that goes | |
| South to the palms or northward to the snows, | 30 |
| Mourning they died | |
| So distant from her side. | |
| But the brave tiger lily blossoms on, | |
| Never to be undone | |
| Till the last rosemary and thyme are gone. | 35 |
| Tattered by autumn storms, she will not fling | |
| Herself to sullen foes. The winter rain | |
| Alone can beat her down, to bloom again | |
Spring after spring.
Ainslee’s Magazine |