“Never nettle
with the unknown,
Look instead to what has grown.”
So our Professor used to say.
You’d whisper to a wiggen tree
And l’d leave class wishing
That just once
You’d talk that way to me.
Remember the puffleskin
Mewling for his lost kin
we found behind the greenhouses
and you smuggled in?
All withered and weary
‘till you’d nursed him round
to gurgle in your pocket
and peek out with a frown.
Even clever Flitwick
who ought to have caught on right quick
Missed the days and ways
You charmed my heart
With every trembling flick.
Cherry wood and unicorn
Yet still all nerves
Round faced and tight lipped.
Sometimes l imagine
Your hidden drawer
Curations of St. Mungo’s
all pocketed before:
A handkerchief, gum wrapper, plastic spoons, shell of skree, a leaf, some lints,
and one lone fairy wing,
Every tiny your mother slipped you
Always
at the end of visiting.
When we were small
l rememberal
Your voice carrying in the Great Hall
Calling for Trevor
Or mumbling you’d lost your
Mimbulus Mimbletonia in a fall.
Until that final year
at last we came back tall.
How l longed to catch your robes
And kiss you
That morning when you hexed
Carrow in the corridor
And hustled squirrely first years
Off to safety unperplexed.
Our darkest days we sank low
But never bottomed long
You’d rally us in humming
Some silly quidditch song.
A little tune of hope and home
Just beneath your breath
Your cheer against the grim to preach
New ways of eating death.
For when the chosen one was dead,
You stood up just the same.
No brows thought he had you sorted
But you sliced through the pain
And charged the very fear
In childhood you dared not name.
Never Neville
Did l nettle in the famed unknown.
Time has gone and my gray hairs
May tell how old we’ve grown.
Never did l dare to ask
a Gryffindor
if he knew my name.
Shyness draws to shyness
Though our houses weren’t the same.
Yet the torch this badger bears you
Still bears a bright’ning flame.