The first part is iambic with half-rhymes. In the second part, the lines alternate between trochaic and iambic tetrameters; and there are half-rhymes in the second and fourth etc lines.
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i.
Bouquets, Easter bouquets, full-bodied, frothing;
Or deep-drift snow, bundled on tumbling fells.
Late April sun: the hawthorn trees amass
Themselves in blossom, jogged by wind-coughs roughing
Their branch-piled opulence. What pictured grace!
Thorned though, like life, by shards beneath their swells.
ii.
Brazen, puerile, urchins cheeking
Though poised to dash, this hawthorn blossom,
Clout by April’s winds, is fragile
Like street boys thin and hunger-lissom.
Begging hands, five-fingered petals,
Accost, cupped palms whited for alms;
Bees will trample, nectar-dizzy,
Grappling the cressy stamens’ combs,
Meting pollen onto stigmas’
Lank finger, bobbed with a fecund head,
Poised to fuse. Like waifs it stews
A scent, half gutter-smirch, half plied
Muskings of the young on heat,
Lewdly accoutred by the leaves’
Phthisic veilings, panders to
The season’s fruiting. Cluttered troves!
Ramp with spring’s few-moment tinture:
Skin-white, quease-green, lips’ fleshy mauve,
Sulphur yellow, pale as gruel:
This blossom orphans’-lust, to live.
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© April 2019
