The Green Children

Led with delight they thus beguile the way,

Untill blustering storme is overblown:

When weening to return, whence they did stray,

But to wander to and fro in ways unknown.

--Edmund Spenser

The Faerie Queene

They left a forest of beautiful gloom
Leaving their brood of green,

Abandoned a cave of fern
To follow the invisible horses
Of human longing

Where the sky broke open
To reveal the furnaces of heaven.

It was an infatuation with the sound
Of tiny bells that drew them out,

Wishing only to join the spirits of the meadow
With green lamps hitched to their tails.

Still the sun blistered their eyes, stunned
Them into forgetting their green, fractured world.

Among the hemlocks and the yew,
In the black and mortal forest
Came an indelicate rising of ghosts.
 
Even so there was a leafy
Dampness to their skins,

A small of sod where owls

With the eyes of cats lifted from the limbs.

Clasping hands like braided flowers,
They vanished to join the weird
Elixirs of the moon.

Ivy and Fern, with names divine,
How they died in the grass like dew.