USELESS?
Flowers are poetry; poetry, flowers:
Each is a clod of earth in bloom.
Useful? Aye, to the heart!—to illume
The rain-drop drip from the wing of the hours.
Both are the love of the great dear God
Set in the sod of the new child-earth,
Set in the heart at the earth-child’s birth,
Soul of the clay, and bloom of the clod.
Flowers and poetry—blossoms of Love
Sweetest and purest the heart can know,
Breathing their perfumes up from below,
Lifting us back to the God above.