Lesbia Harford: Verses about Children

Child Sun
Why will you play Peep Bo
Now in, now out
The workroom window so?
True 'tis
That there are children here;
But they've no time
To play Peep Bo, my dear.

I'd like to spend long hours at home
With a small child to bother me.
I'd take her out to see the shops
And fuss about my husband's tea.
Instead of this I spend my days
In noisy schoolrooms, harsh and bare.
Unloved am I, since people give
Too many children to my care.

When I was still a child
I thought my love would be
Noble, truthful, brave,
And very kind to me.
Then all the novels said
That if my lover prove
No such man as this
He had to forfeit love.
Now I know life holds
Harder tasks in store.
If my lover fail
I must love him more.
Should he prove unkind,
What am I, that he
Squander soul and strength
Smoothing life for me?
Weak or false or cruel
Love must still be strong.
All my life I'll learn
How to love as long.

I sit at my machine,
Hour long beside me Vera aged nineteen,
Babbles her sweet and innocent tale of sex.

Her boy, she hopes, will prove
Unlike his father in the act of love,
Twelve children are too many for her taste.

She looks sidelong, blue-eyed
And tells a girlish story of a bride
With the sweet licence of Arabian queens.

Her child, she says, saw light
Minute for minute, nine months from the night
The mother first lay in her lover’s arms.

She says a friend of hers
Is a man’s mistress who gives jewels and furs
But will not have her soft limbs cased in stays.

The lilies in the garden walk
Are out today.
The nuns all came to look at them,
To look and say
They wouldn't last to deck the crib
On Christmas day.
They had outstripped the Holy Child.
And yet at least
They should have been for Ursula,
Lucy, Joan, Perpetua,
Have glittered on the altar through some virgin feast.
The lilies in the convent walk
Are fair to see.
They have forgotten baby Christs,
It seems to me.
They laugh and toss their royal heads
In ecstasy.
And still they say I must believe
Like princely churls
For all your lovely purity,
Catherine, Mary, Dorothy,
We will not die as altar flowers for dreaming girls.

One summer day, along the street,
Men pruned the gums
To make them neat.
The tender branches, white with flowers,
Lay in the sun
For hours and hours,
And every hour they grew more sweet,
More honey-like
Until the street
Smelt like a hive, withouten bees.
But still the gardeners
Lopped the trees.
Then came the children out of school,
Noisy and separate
As their rule Of being is. The spangled trees
Gave them one heart:
Such power to please
Had all the flowering branches strown
Around for them
To make their own.
Then such a murmuring arose
As made the ears
Confirm the nose
And give the lie to eyes. For hours
Child bees hummed
In the honey flowers.
They gathered sprigs and armfuls. Some
Ran with their fragrant
Burdens home,
And still returned; and after them
Would drag great boughs.
Some stripped a stem
Of rosy flowers and played with these.
Never such love
Had earthly trees
As these young creatures gave. By night,
The treasured sprays
Of their delight
Were garnered every one. The street
Looked, as the council liked it, neat.