A Houyhnhnm's Scrapbook/Number 1/The Casual Child

What will she be when she grows up?
The casual visitors had said.
She didn’t turn her quiet head
To catch the meaning, didn’t cup
A hand, as if to cuddle flowers
Of different colored thought from ours.
Her mother only shrugged and smiled.
But there upon the hot day porch
You heard the pindrop patter scorch;
The mother’s roman candles piled
Their pindrops on the casual child,
The clever child whose dumbshow dreams,
Made of a different stuff from ours,
Juggled away those steelhead streams.
Bombardments of her mother’s schemes
Danced about her in harmless showers.