Poems of Emily Dickinson: Nature XXV

The mushroom is the elf of plants,

At evening it is not;

At morning in a truffled hut

It stops upon a spot

As if it tarried always;

and yet its whole career

is shorter than a snake's delay,

And fleeter than a tare.

'Tis vegetation's juggler,

The germ of alibi;

Doth like a bubble antedate,

And like a bubble hie.

I feel as if the grass were pleased

To have it intermit;

The surreptitious scion

Of summer's circumspect.

Had nature any outcast face,

Could she a son contemn,

Had nature an Iscariot,

That mushroom, --- it is him.