THE CHILD AND THE HEART BEREFT, a poem

MY garden, long time desolate,
     Were still of pleasure reft and bare
But for one single, lonely bloom
     That would insist on flowering there.

A fragile thing, in that chill place
     It grew where other joys were not,
Waxing a lovelier hope each day,—
     Albeit half tended, half forgot,—

Until with wild, resistless charm
     That sorrow's very self doth cheat,
It maketh of my desert drear
     A sunlit garden, fresh and sweet.

"The Child and the Heart Bereft" by Florence Earle Coates. Published in Poems (1916) Volume II.