BellaOnline Forums Home and Garden Container Gardening Kind Words Kind Deeds

Hi there all,

Kind hearts are the gardens,
Kind thoughts are the roots,
Kind words are the flowers,
Kind deeds are the fruits,
Take care of your garden,
And keep out the weeds,
Fill it with sunshine,
Kind words and kind deeds.

~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

I just came across this and fell in love with it straightaway! Hope you like it too.

Cheers now

Hi there to you all,

Here's another one - and I will keep adding them as I find them. Hope you do too ...

Found

Once in the forest
I strolled content,
To look for nothing
My sole intent.

I saw a flower,
Shaded and shy,
Shining like starlight,
Bright as an eye.

I went to pluck it;
Gently it said:
Must I be broken,
Wilt and be dead?

Then whole I dug it
Out of the loam
And to my garden
Carried it home,

There to replant it
Where no wind blows.
More bright than ever
It blooms and grows.

Goethe

Cheers now

...an another one!

To a Butterfly ~ William Wordsworth

I've watched you now a full half-hour;
Self-poised upon that yellow flower
And, little Butterfly!
Indeed I know not if you sleep or feed.
How motionless! — not frozen seas
More motionless! and then
What joy awaits you, when the breeze
Hath found you out among the trees,
And calls you forth again!

Cheers

... en nog een (for anyone out there who speaks Afrikaans)

This one is fun too a tells of love, life and laughter and TIME PASSING. Carpe diem as we know.

The heading of the poem roughly translated is
"Now let us crown ourselves with Roses before we grow feeble."

Coronemus nos Rosis antequam marcescant


LET us drink and be merry, dance, joke, and rejoice,
With claret and sherry, theorbo and voice!
The changeable world to our joy is unjust,
All treasure 's uncertain,
Then down with your dust! 5
In frolics dispose your pounds, shillings, and pence,
For we shall be nothing a hundred years hence.

We'll sport and be free with Moll, Betty, and Dolly,
Have oysters and lobsters to cure melancholy:
Fish-dinners will make a man spring like a flea, 10
Dame Venus, love's lady,
Was born of the sea;
With her and with Bacchus we'll tickle the sense,
For we shall be past it a hundred years hence.

Your most beautiful bride who with garlands is crown'd 15
And kills with each glance as she treads on the ground,
Whose lightness and brightness doth shine in such splendour
That none but the stars
Are thought fit to attend her,
Though now she be pleasant and sweet to the sense, 20
Will be damnable mouldy a hundred years hence.

Then why should we turmoil in cares and in fears,
Turn all our tranquill'ty to sighs and to tears?
Let 's eat, drink, and play till the worms do corrupt us,
'Tis certain, Post mortem 25
Nulla voluptas.
For health, wealth and beauty, wit, learning and sense,
Must all come to nothing a hundred years hence.

Cheers now

Lestie, I love your poetry selections! You must have a kind heart! Susan

Thank you for that sweet comment Susan, gobbled up immediately and tucked away for a rainy day!

Cheers and in search of more poetry...

Here is another poem I came across - I so liked it especially that last verse! But actually, that is difficult to say as she captures so much about the pleasure of knowing a garden - especially when it is your own. She does this simply and succinctly. Good stuff.

.................................................................

Behind a Wall by Amy Lowell (1912)

I own a solace shut within my heart,
A garden full of many a quaint delight
And warm with drowsy, poppied sunshine; bright,
Flaming with lilies out of whose cups dart
Shining things
With powdered wings.

Here terrace sinks to terrace, arbors close
The ends of dreaming paths; a wanton wind
Jostles the half-ripe pears, and then, unkind,
Tumbles a-slumber in a pillar rose,
With content
Grown indolent.

By night my garden is o'erhung with gems
Fixed in an onyx setting. Fireflies
Flicker their lanterns in my dazzled eyes.
In serried rows I guess the straight, stiff stems
Of hollyhocks
Against the rocks.

So far and still it is that, listening,
I hear the flowers talking in the dawn;
And where a sunken basin cuts the lawn,
Cinctured with iris, pale and glistening,
The sudden swish
Of a waking fish
.................................................................

Cheers now