The Little Flower Song

Let's walk and talk

Let's go where the little, little flowers grow

Just over the hill, just past the bend

Let's go where the little, little flowers grow

They're small like you, they're small like me

They'll help us shrink, maybe

They're small like you, they're small like me

They'll help us smile, maybe

Baby, let's walk - we don't even have to talk

Just go where the little, little flowers grow

Just over the hill, just past the bend

Let's go where the little, little flowers grow

They're small like you, they're small like me

They'll help us smile, maybe

They're small like you, they're small like me

They'll help us shrink, maybe

Let's walk

And go where the little, little flowers grow

Just over the hill, just past the bend

Let's go where the little, little flowers grow...

 Nature, Mother

Breadth of stone and slip of earth:

Can you catch the rush of birth?

What is life, and what’s its name,

You who never lived untamed?

Brassy brush, electric fields

Of saffron, sunlit, stretching shields

Across the span of endless slope

—and you assert you know of hope?

And what its content, what its worth,

Why it flickers through the firth?

How it fuses seen, unseen

Into a mesmerizing stream?

You know nothing! yet you drip

With words of folly that would rip

The truth to shards—if it could be

(But it cannot, as sight will see).

Sunset bursts on winter’s rage:

Broken blood on whitest page;

Cuts of diamond light like stars,

Force of luminescent bars

Scatter, while the sunlight sighs

Itself into seraphic skies.

—And you with footsteps barely made

Propose to call the light the shade?

Nature only laughs at you!

As she swirls herself anew

Through the night and into day

In her celestial, charming way.

Petty man, with comic fist,

Thrust against horizons kissed

By order, rhythm, doubtless dawn:

How are you anything but con?

Pride of man! How sick you are!

How dare you touch and try to mar

Her perfect ways, as clear as sun,

Her varied lovely, moved as one.

With reverence gone and thoughtless mind,

You fool yourself; the earth’s not blind!

And nature will in patience move—

With constant, subtle, pressure prove

You, but dastard dust to be:

You, but nothing; she, the queen—

She, with laughing, firm decree

Will set you straight, immediately

At the time when best you’ll fall,

When you’ve grown beyond your gall:

The grass itself is on her side,

And nature always conquers pride.

This a warning, earthen one:

Do not tempt the mammoth sun,

Nor skip of snow, nor steel of strange

Light that shifts the mountain range.

You know nothing! Cower now

Beneath the truth of fire and cloud:

Yes is yes and no is no;

Life is life and go is go;

Nature is what nature is,

And no matter how you hiss,

She will triumph utterly:

Surrender now—she’ll set you free.

Grace Said to Me

To finish, this is a song that was written for another one of my nieces. The lyrics are a barely-adjusted form of the exact conversation we had on her birthday a few years back.

Grace said to me,

"I don't like the way the days go by me.

Every night I'm sad that day will never, ever be again."

And I said,

"Darling, keep that sensitive heart.

Oh, darling, never let them take who you are away."

Grace said to me,

"I don't like my birthday--it just means

That time has come and gone and I am never ready for it!"

And I said,

"Darling, don't go worrying in the dark.

And darling, find a way to smile even when it's hard to do."

"Grace, I know how hard it is to learn how life can be,

How so often it is really grief after grief.

But darling--who you are is who you are.

Oh, darling, keep that sensitive heart

But darling, don't go worrying in the dark;

And darling: don't go worrying in the dark."