Pro Matris Natalem

The World she spins, see days and nights be blurred,
And years their seasons alter, leaves and buds
With o’erwiping frost exchange; watch we
The generations come helplessly
The each they spring into the flow’rs of youth
Then walk us up accomplishment and sense,
The virileness of bones and steel of action,
And plant us seeds in winter, come the summer
Of our lives to watch the seedlings germ,
And spend our most productive time a-watering
The precious weed, by God at times we prune
As well, and train their growth, and in our Autumns
Behold the stock-strong treeling and its shoots
That bend but upend boulders as they grow,
And full of sap and burst with leaves drink the sun.

So thus come of thy birth the gold retread,
And think thou full of the garden planted,
What grew and withered, which blossoms early browned,
And which yet bloom with constant beauty; be
There others still in bud in moist soil, that thou
Know they’re tended fair and cannot fail, were thou
Repotted, to ope their petals full upon
The changing world. And whither shalt thou go,
The master planter always needed—yet
Another’s shoot and bloom thou had been grown?
Remember always liable to be picked and dried,
Like an ornament hung by the Most Great Gard’ner,
In our minds preserved forever the strongest bloom,
Who held our heads and wiped our bums and made
The World to seem a scary-less place.

Just be that time some many years away,
Oh let my summer and your autumn last
And the joy each of chirping birds and brilliant flames
Of leaves, and night air pure and sound
And coldening dew on sandaled feet and shoe-clad;
Oh there is life in plenty even in our short spans,
And yet a lifetime left, it seems, or two
In which to know thee and to love thee more,
As if no lucky blossom thou wert, but
Our very sun, to whom our limbs shall bend
Alway as nat’rally as the earth does move,
From whom the shine of nutriment receive,
The constant beaming smile of a never-setting sun.

And may it be so always; curse we the spin,
The compulsive turn of Earth, its tyranny;
In an image sometimes we would be happy,
The leaves mid-flutter; the tree still on
Her sapling bending a just-enough kindly shade;
It cannot hap this way, but for its hap
We ever thank thee; let us grow but more
And shield the other for awhile, and so
A gratitude so much deserved pay back.