This week’s Saturday Snippet is from a poem called “For and Against the Environment”, by D. M. Black, from a favorite anthology, “The Oxford Book of Garden Verse.”

I have come out to smell the hyacinths which again in this

North London garden

Have performed a wonderful feat of chemistry and hauled

that delectable perfume

out of the blackish confection of clay and potsherds which

feebly responds when I name it flower-bed;

and so wet was the Spring that I clipped the grass with

shears, to prevent the mower sliding in mud,

and my attempt to dig the beds to enhance their fertility

foundered caked with clods.