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Title: The Nun's Garden
Author: Frank Oliver Call [
More Titles by Call]
They have made me a lovely garden
With walls that are rugged and gray;
They have filled it with pinks and roses
And lilies that bloom but a day;
But the walls are so high and frowning,
And the paths are so smooth and straight,
And even their smallest winding
Leads straight to the chapel gate.
I have planted a bed of pansies
Along by the chapel wall,
But though I have watered and weeded
They never have blossomed at all.
The sunshine of God cannot fall there,
For the chapel tower is too high;
So under its cold, gray shadow
My poor little blossoms die.
The Mother of God--in marble--
Gleams white where the willows toss,
And at the far end of the pathway
The dear Christ hangs on the cross;
And when the vespers are over,
If I have not sinned all day,
I may walk to the end of the garden
And kneel by the cross and pray.
But oh, for the wild, wild garden
That I knew in the days gone by,
Where the birches and elms and maples
Stretched up to the wind-swept sky;
Where, murmuring silver music,
The brook through the ferny dell
Ran down to the fields of clover,--
But hush, there's the vesper bell!
[The end]
Frank Oliver Call's poem: Nun's Garden
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