The woods

by Douglas Malloch

THE SNOW IS HERE

The snow is here.

I heard it in the night

Upon the roof in marshaled measure tramp.

The passing year

Has changed the world to white

And set the seal of Winter on the camp.

But yesterday

A footpath down the hill

Touched hands with other roads that led afar;

But now the way

Is hidden ’neath the chill

Of diamonded drifts that glisten like the star.

We are shut in

From ev’ry distant thing,

That other life amid the world of men,

From dirt and din,

Until returning Spring

Shall find the road and waken us again.

The chore-boy now

His frosted finger blows

And makes his path from islanded door to door;

Like sturdy prow

He parts the billowed snows

And heaps his brands of comfort on the floor.

The fire he plies

With piles of pitchy pine

Until the flames roar upward in a gale;

And we arise

To breathe the wintry wine,

To plunge abroad and icy tasks assail.

So breaks the day;

So comes the arctic dawn

In this our little world when snow is here;

And so away

The months shall follow on

Till softer skies shall mark another year.

The horses stamp

In clouds of steamy smoke,

The teamster’s voice of mastery await;

Their bits they champ

And shake their leather yoke—

And life breaks forth where life is isolate.

Now from the wood,

The timber on the hill,

Comes stroke of ax and sawyer’s steady swing;

The tree that stood

Beside the frozen rill

In powdered snow to earth comes thundering.

Thus passes day

With shout and merry call,

With echoed blow and crosscut’s swishy sweep,

Until the gray

Of eve envelopes all

And drives us back to shelter and to sleep.

Though this our life,

A rugged life and plain,

Of sudden danger and of slow reward,

The wind a knife,

A scimitar of pain,

With death to fight and frosty stream to ford,

Though chill the way,

Laborious the toil,

Though rough the fare, the habitation rude,

Though skies be gray,

Though stubborn be the soil,

And even day a night of solitude—

We fondly know,

We know, in other years

When we shall look again on sunny seas,

This land of snow

Shall rise from out our tears

And dearest seem of all our memories.