Heart’s Ease grew over the rocks:
viola tricolor wild pansy heart’s delight
johnny-jump-up-and-kiss-me
The pansies grew solitary, lateral.
three faces in a hood love in idleness
The song they wouldn’t play
for dead Juliet was Heart’s Ease.
It was not the time to play
and I had a father who would relent—
or so I thought. I kept a valve
in my heart trained in his direction,
and before my mother knew him
she wrote that she was a particle broken
from the grand mass of mankind.
Faint purple blossoms: common, not needed.
Name a thing a hundred ways
and will it surface? I am underfoot
and scattered, waiting like she
waited. I have not a single memory
of warmth.
And none of her.
Yours,
M. Shelley (daughter of M. Wollstonecraft)
(“…a particle broken / from the grand mass of mankind…” is from Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark.)