Poems (Coates 1916)/Volume II/The Child and the Heart Bereft

by Florence Earle Coates

THE CHILD AND THE HEART BEREFT

MY garden, long time desolate,
Were still of pleasure reft and bare
But for one single, lonely bloom
That would insist on flowering there.

A fragile thing, in that chill place
It grew where other joys were not,
Waxing a lovelier hope each day,—
Albeit half tended, half forgot,—

Until with wild, resistless charm
That sorrow's very self doth cheat,
It maketh of my desert drear
A sunlit garden, fresh and sweet.