Lady’s Smock (Milk-maids or Cuckoo-flower)

Gangly stems on damp clay-ey verge,
sun-bleached smocks like a milky surge
of many small flowers, lilac-pale;
Milk-maids wave in a soggy vale.
Lower leaf-stalks with leaflets rounded,
– some grow roots, bud, – new plants are founded.
Top leaves’ leaflets are linear, thin.
Cuckoo-flowers lifted while the cuckoos sing.