Running Through the Stars

Is our old front paddock
sprinkled once again
with Early Nancy lilies,
Anguillaria dioica,
those harbingers of spring?

It’s over sixty years
since I picked that first fistful
to give to my mother
and the blue glass eyebath
held those too-short stems.

Is that paddock even still there,
hiding its secret bulbs
of Blackman’s Potatoes?
It might be under houses:
the town has grown since then.

Perhaps now, in rooms there,
children wake, puzzled
by half-remembered dreams.
Through drifts of Golden Sun-moths,
they’ve been running barefoot
in a paddock of Wallaby-grass,
rough pasture dotted
with tiny, white,
purple-hearted stars.