Strawberry handmaiden

The Strawberry Handmaiden is a single poem using rich imagery that brings the reader into a fantasy world of royalty and serfs. We meet a young prince who has made a decree that strawberry seeds are not allowed on his strawberries; however, upon meeting a handmaiden, his decree is forgotten (and the queen intervenes).  The Strawberry Handmaiden is written in ten four-line stanzas. Each stanza ends with the same rhyme, and each ending word is repeated in the same place in each of the following stanza (you'll see what I mean as you read). In this digital edition, every two stanzas are further differentiated by assignment as their own seperate sub-chapter. Even though the poem is written in anapestic tetrameter, I did use conventions for dropping a syllable, usually from the start of a line such that, for those of you who may count syllables, some lines may be less than needed for a true anapestic line count.