Muriel Stuart

1889-1967 / England

The Cloudberry

Give me no coil of daemon flowers-
Pale Messalines that faint and brood
Through the spent and secret twilight hours
On their strange feasts of blood.

Five me wild things of moss and peat-
The gipsy flower that bravely goes,
The heather's little hard, brown feet,
And the black eyes of sloes.

But most of all the cloudberry
That offers in her clean, white cup
The melting snows-the cloudberry!
Where the great winds go up

To the hushed peak whose shadow fills
The air with silence calm and wide-
She lives, the Dian of the hills,
And the streams course beside.
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