"Cut Grass Lies Frail"

Now, on sunny afternoons, the peaceful drone of lawn mowers can be heard in the distance.  The scent of freshly-cut grass arrives on the breeze.  White and yellow daffodils border the lawns.  The magnolias and dogwoods are in bloom.  The scene is like something out of a Philip Larkin pastoral.  (Such scenes do exist -- together with a hint of mortality, of course.)

               Cut Grass

Cut grass lies frail:
Brief is the breath
Mown stalks exhale.
Long, long the death

It dies in the white hours
Of young-leafed June
With chestnut flowers,
With hedges snowlike strewn,

White lilac bowed,
Lost lanes of Queen Anne's lace,
And that high-builded cloud
Moving at summer's pace.

Philip Larkin, High Windows (Faber and Faber 1974). 

               Stanley Roy Badmin, "Spring in the West Country" (1963)