Flower Fairies
Flower Fairies have you found them,
When the summer dusk is falling,
With the glow-worms all around them,
Have you heard them softly calling?
Calling through your garden spaces
Notes like fairy bells set ringing,
Heard from out enchanted places
Whence the fairy bees come winging?
Silent stand they through the noonlight
In their flower shapes fair and quiet,
But they quit them in the moonlight,
In its beams to sing and riot.
I have heard them, I have seen them,
From their petals light-like raying,
And the trees would fain have been them,
The great trees too old for playing.
Hundreds of them altogether,
Flashing flocks of flying fairies,
Crowding through the summer weather,
Seeking where the coolest air is.
And they tell the trees that know them,
As upon their boughs they hover,
Of the things that chance below them,
How the rose has a new lover.
And the roses laugh, protesting
That the lilies are as fickle;
Then they look where birds are nesting,
And their feathers softly tickle.
Then away they all go sweeping,
Having had their fill of gladness,
But the trees, their night-watch keeping,
Feel a tender, loving sadness.
For they know of bleak December,
When each bough to pain left bare is,
When they only shall remember
Those bright visitings of fairies.
When the roses and the lilies
Shall be gone to come back never,
To a land where all so still is
That they sleep and sleep for ever.
Philip Bourke Marston.