Waxing Poetic: The Seed Shop by Muriel Stuart

  
     Muriel Stuart (1885 - 1967) was the daughter of a Scottish barrister who wrote several books of poetry and lived most of her life in London.  She abandoned poetry during her later years and turned to gardening.  Her gardening book, Gardner’s Nightcap, was a bestseller in 1938 and has been reprinted by Persephone Books.

The Seed Shop

Here in a quiet and dusty room they lie,

Faded as crumbled stone or shifting sand,

Forlorn as ashes, shrivelled, scentless, dry--

Meadows and gardens running through my hand.

Dead that shall quicken at the call of Spring,

Sleepers to stir beneath June's magic kiss,

Though birds pass over, unremembering,

And no bee seek here roses that were his.

In this brown husk a dale of hawthorn dreams,

A cedar in this narrow cell is thrust

That will drink deeply of a century's streams,

These lilies shall make summer on my dust.

Here in their safe and simple house of death,

Sealed in their shells a million roses leap;

Here I can blow a garden with my breath,

And in my hand a forest lies asleep.