The little, fragile, white-haired lady
Stepped outside in the English moon,
And she thought of her long-lost African moonlight,
So taken for granted, and gone so soon.
She peered at her small, trim English garden,
She smelt the jasmine above her door,
But the sleeping shrubs, the lawns and lupins,
It wasn’t these that her dim eyes saw;
She saw the plumes of jacaranda
Softly against the pale sky laid,
The amethyst fountain of bougainvillea,
The ebon depths of the mango’s shade,
The clustering hills and mist-filled valleys,
They cypress rising like a shout
Of joy to the moon-drowned stars.
She shivered, turned, and shut the moonlight out.
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I was pleased to find this poem by Stella Wood. she speaks of Africa but the Jacaranda, Bougainvillea and Mango trees she speaks of I have in my own Australian garden. I can appreciate why she writes of them as she does. She didn't live long enough to be a white-haired old lady, as she died at 42 - makes the reader wonder; Is she writing as she thought she may have been or of someone else? For the reader to decide. Poignant poem. Von
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