Dandelion

by Annie Rankin Annan

Art by Maggie Vanderwalle

At dawn, when England's childish tongue

Lisped happy truths, and men were young,

Her Chaucer, with a gay content

Hummed through the shining fields, scarce bent

By poet's foot, and, plucking, set,

All lusty, sunny, dewy-wet,

A dandelion in his verse,

Like the first gold in childhood's purse.

At noon, when harvest colours die

On the pale azure of the sky,

And dreams through dozing grasses creep

Of winds that are themselves asleep,

Rapt Shelley found the airy ghost

Of that bright flower the spring loves most,

And ere one silvery ray was blown

From its full disk made it his own.

Now from the stubble poets glean

Scant flowers of thought; the Muse would wean

Her myriad nurslings, feeding them

On petals plucked from a dry stem.

For one small plumule still adrift,

The wind-blown dandelion's gift,

The fields once blossomy we scour

Where the old poets plucked the flower.