
A few posts back, I wrote about the need for more Ivy carols to replace those that we've lost. Well, here's a new one. For reasons best known only to my poet's intuition, I've cast it in the form of an Elizabethan art song. I've tried to remain true both to botanical reality and to the genre's traditional (if playful) gender wars. There's a tune waiting out there somewhere, I'm sure of it.
Sing Holly, Sing Ivy
Of all the trees
that in winter be green,
sing Holly, sing Ivy,
if Holly be king,
then Ivy is queen.