after Laurie Lee, ‘Milkmaid’
‘Tender cress and cuckoo-flower: And curly-haired, fair-headed maids, Sweet was the sound of their singing’*
just one of many guises:
‘Our Lady’s smock’, or ‘fairy flowers’
that come in varied sizes.
The flower, they said, could bring bad luck
so rarely picked for remedies;
but sometimes risked to use like cress
to pepper up the lunchtime cheese.
The ‘May flower’ tells us when it blooms
while ‘coco plants’ confuse the mind,
the rustic ‘milkmaid’ seems to show
an image that is less refined.
The name suggests a dainty wench,
just like the flower, a pleasant sight,
who tends the herd in shaded barn
in frilly smock, all dazzling white.
They say the blooming coincides
with cuckoo’s call; they may be right
but milkmaids conjure up the mood
of summer’s idyll at its height.
Lee’s marigolds and buttercups
and ‘brimming harvest of their day’
reveal to us a bygone time,
remind us of those country ways.
Julia Duke
*From a 15th or 16th Century Irish poem in Kenneth Jackson's "Early Celtic Nature Poetry"
Photo by Derweg via Pixabay