From Mother Goose Nursery Rhymes by Arthur Rackham. “The fair maid who, the first of May, Goes to the fields at break of day, And washes in dew from the hawthorn tree, Will ever after handsome be.”
Sunday’s May Day and I thought this illustration fit Tricia’s poem nicely. If you’re not familiar with the amazing Arthur Rackham, check out his work here.
Happy (almost) May Day!
—Sandra Knauf
The Arthur Rackham Forest in Spring
The gnomes no longer hide
in the cleft of half-rotten trees.
Not this season, this time,
they snort behind fallen limbs
hung in spring-green mosses,
and fall silent as I pass.
Where the globular man
spins dreams from knobby fingers
stillness camouflages him from me.
Above where the woods violets
wink yellow at the tree frogs, wrens sing
of wing rebirth out of sight of fairies.
In the splintered hoary trunk of crabapple
tree, where early buds swell up,
tree-maids flutter first wings,
rejoice at all the upthrust of spring.
Beneath my foot winter downfalls crack
and chokecherry blossoms snow
on dawn’s long shadows, the creek and me.
* * *
Tricia Knoll is a Portland, Oregon poet who has maintained gardens all her life, sowing the seeds of sanity. She grew up admiring her mother’s roses and vegetable garden. She is an Oregon State University Master Gardener and volunteers at Portland’s Washington Park Rose Test Garden. Her chapbook Urban Wild is available from Amazon and focuses on interactions between humans and wildlife in urban habitat.
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