Three-year-old daughter, your straw locks are tossed

by invisible hands as you hippety-hop

knee-high through summer-long beckoning grass. 

Your arms flap-flap as you spirit along;

you touch here, you touch there, you touch and you’re gone.

Fragile red-jacketed butterfly, 

new-hatched from your infant cocoon – 

you’re alive, and your cup overflows

and your eyes light the sky

and the world opens wide

for today you can fly.

The meadow needs mowing. A soft morning mist

has kissed the coronas that yesterday gilded

the green spires of dandelions. What father or gardener

dare cut those dancing tiaras to size?

And would he too have a hummingbird coo?

God be gracious unto you. 

Lord, be merciful unto you. 

May you never need reason to soar iridescent,

to ride on the dawn and strike joy from the present, 

for ever and ever, Amen. 

Dancing buoyant, sun-bright, like ecstatic bubbles,

on the crest of a long breaking wave,

a firefly in timelessness, child of the wind, 

across memory’s meadow you sparkle towards me. 

What’s that in your hand? Just a leaf?

Little one, I know what you don’t

what you won’t ‘til you stand

at the edge of a meadow with eyes that can’t see.

That isn’t a leaf that you hold in your hand – 

that is me. 

n Jim Taylor, 1967