Wild Cherry Branches
i.
Lithe sprays of freshness and faint perfume.
You are strange in a London room;
Sweet foreigners come to the dull, close city.
Your flowers are memories, clear in the gloom,
That sigh with regret and are fragrant with pity.
ii.
Flowers, a week since your long, sweet branches
Swayed, hardly seen, in the dusk overhead;
(We live, but the bloom on our living is dead).
Ah ! look, where the white moon launches
Her skiff in the skies where the roof-tops spread,
iii.
Like rocks on her course. But she rose not so
Through your wavering sprays, when the April weather
Smelt only of flowers a week ago—
On your stems, in my heart, did such blossoms blow!
Let us sigh all together!
iv.
Your sigh is, perchance, for the neighbouring bushes
With soft, yellow palms, or the song of the thrushes;
But mine for none of the birds that sing,
No flower of the spring.
But for two distant eyes and a voice that hushes.
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