Classic Poem

Ground-fern brushed your knee as we passed them,
Tree-fern drooped to my head,
And the stream at the foot of the mountain
Brawled with the fern in its bed.
Rose-apples blossomed above us,
White-tasseled, poignantly sweet,
And the rain piled crude fallen apples
Into jeweled heaps at our feet.

Rose-apples are lure and fulfilment,
Rose-apples are fruit and are flower.
(The rain built its gray walls about us,
The rose-apples rooted us an hour.)
We went down through the tropic evening
When the gray rain had ceased to fall;
But one hour we were gods on a hill-top
In a blossoming pomarrosal!