Snowdrop

My favourite spring flowers snowdrops have sprung into our tiny garden, pushing their little heads through the cold frozen earth to brighten my overgrown borders. I love them and I love this....


Snowdrop
by Alice Oswold

A pale and pining girl, head bowed, heart gnawed,
whose figure nods and shivers in a shawl
of fine white will, has suddenly appeared
in the damp woods, as mild and mute as snowfall.
She may not last. She has no strength at all,
but stoops and shakes as if she'd stood all night
on one bare foot, confiding with the moonlight.

One among several hundred clear-eyed ghosts
who get up in the cold and blink and turn
into these trembling emblems of night frosts,
she brings her burnt heart with her in an urn
of ashes, which she opens to re-mourn,
having no other outlet to express
her wild-flower sense of wounded gentleness.

Yes, she's no more now than a drop of snow
on a green stem - her name is now her calling.
Her mind is just a frozen melting glow
of water swollen to the point of falling,
which maybe has no meaning. There's no telling.
But what a beauty, what a mighty power
of patience kept intact is now in flower.