She still finds hers, sometimes,
unexpected flashes of colour
hidden in the creases of a book:

compressed bits of summer,
small slivers of her girlhood:
such fragile glimmering remnants.

Daisy, poppy, cow parsley,
other unnamable flowers –
all wafer-thin, desiccated,

persevering years past
their allotted moment.
But never a four-leaf clover.

She was never that lucky,
though she looked and looked –
fields, lawns, hedges, verges,

her head always down
when it should’ve been up,
plucking the day to save for later.

But here’s a four-leaf clover
stuck to a slip of paper
with clear sticky-back plastic –

the luck not hers,
but a gift from a girl in her class
who’d observed her quiet desperation

as they sat on the lunchtime grass,
then slid it on her desk the next morning:
Here, I seem to find them wherever I go.