Inside a College Room
I made a strange mistake the other day
to bring indoors from the escaping fall
a milkweed pod, half sprung and feathered out:
for still it nods in ragged dreams of motion
waiting perplexed for a familiar wind
that will not come, that will not ever come.
Nowhere to sail to, no wide-launching wind,
O caught, becalmed! I might have known the fraud,
I might have trusted to the sloven field
where spring was promised truly. Here, what stir?
What furious rumple, tattered all to joy
could ever break this decorous design?
Why, if a careless thought (the best are so)
by some mistake of season or of soil
should stray in here, half-formed and feathery,
inviting any braggart wind's delight,
whirling with seed and storm, to blow it wide,
here it would nod, a pale exotic waif,
dreaming in vain of an outrageous flower.
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