Dahlias

WHILE Autumn spills her loveliness
Where living jewels grow,
Full gratitude would I express
That, many years ago,
From Swedish shores the good
Herr Dahl set out for Mexico.

IN Mexico, old Mexico,
In days gone in the gloom
Of centuries, lost years ago,
A man long in his tomb —
An Aztec garden-lover — toiled
to make a garden bloom.

AND so — in fancy I prefer
To dream — by bed and bower
This ancient Aztec amateur
Spent many a toilful hour,
Until, one day, there bloomed
for him a truly magic flower.

TOO soon the ruthless Spaniard came,
Man’s progress to impress,
Till that old race was but a name.
Yet, out of death’s distress,
Seed wafted from the magic bloom
into the wilderness.

AND hither, after many a year,
Had shaped the land anew,
Came Dahl, to rediscover here
The bloom an Aztec grew,
And rescue from the wilderness
beauty for me and you.

NOW, when I walk the garden’s ways
In this, a newer land,
And see the wondrous colors blaze
And burn at every hand,
I bless good Dahl and that vague
ghost who all this magic planned.

BY bordered path and garden bed
Glow blossoms great and small,
Huge blooms lift each a lovely head
On stems serenely tall
O’er clustered pompones crimped
and shaped each to a perfect ball.

AND now, when Autumn comes to boast
Of joys that Summer missed,
I would stand forth and pledge a toast
To Dahl, the botanist,
And that strange being lost in time,
the Aztec alchemist.