Clover at Twilight

a poem and some thoughts about clover

Another recent poem of dusk…

Twilight. And the clover leaves have folded,
All the flowers gleaming white above them,
Waiting for the stars, alike for dawning,
Scented faint of springtime and of honey.
From the earth the roaming darkness rises,
Flows about my feet among the clover;
Overhead the stars are not yet shining,
But below their ageless gleam is mirrored,
Bloom by twilit bloom, across the hillside.
All the slender stems rise up to hold them,
All the rounded leaves lie tight together,
And the blooms lamp quietly the gloaming,
All the absent stars of evening sprinkled
Round my feet to shine among the shadows.

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I was walking along the driveway in the evening, admiring the clover. We have a gravel drive, and the centre is all grown up with clover and other plants.

I noticed that the clover leaves were folded tightly shut for the night. Oddly enough, I’ve never before noticed that clover does this. Several years ago I wrote about some of my desert plants displaying this phenomenon, known as nyctinasty. It is fairly common among legumes, and of course clover is a member of the family Fabaceae. So there it is.

But there was also this poem, the first section composed in my head while I was walking along the drive, admiring the closed leaves and very wide-awake flowers.

For the record, there is one word which was left out of the original version. Would you care to guess what it is?

After posting it on Medium, I realized abruptly that one line had only four feet “From my feet the darkness rises”. As the rest of the poem is quite consistent and (to my mind at any rate) this consistency is part of the charm of its flow, there seemed no reason to leave it with this irregularity.

So I thought for a bit and added the word “roaming”, and honestly, I’m entirely pleased by the results as there is more meaning and mood in the line with the word added.

Hope you’ve enjoyed this little foray among the clover!