The Outbound Trail—The Outbound Trail—
We hear it calling still:
Coralline bight where the waves churn white—
Ocean and plain and hill:
Jungle and palm—where the starlit calm
The Wanderer’s loves fulfil.
Where the bleak, black blizzards blinding sweep
Across the crumpled floe,
And the Living Light makes white the night
Above the boundless snow,
And the sentinel penguins watch the waste
Where the whale and the walrus go:
Where the phosphor fires flash and flare
Along the bellowing bow,
And the soft salt breeze of the Southern Seas
Is sifting across the prow,
And the glittering Cross in the blue-black sky,
The Watcher of Then and Now:
We’ll lift again the lineless plain
Where the deep-cut rivers run—
And the pallid peaks as the eagle seeks
His crag when the day is done:
And the rose-red glaciers glance and gleam
In the glow of the setting sun.
We’ll go once more to a farther shore—
We’ll track the outbound trail;
Harbor and hill where the World stands still—
Where the strange-rigged fishers sail—
And only the tune of the tasseled fronds,
Like the moan of a distant gale.
We’ll tramp anew the jungle through
Where ferned Pitcairnias rise,
And the softly fanned Tjemaras stand
Green lace against the skies,
And the last red ray of the tropic day
Flickers and flares and dies.
Across the full-swung, shifting seas
There comes a beck’ing gleam,
Strong as the iron hand of Fate—
Sweet as a lover’s dream.
What can bind us—what can keep us—
Who shall tell us nay?
When the Outbound Trail is calling us—
Is calling us away.
THE FOOL
In the first gray dawn of history
A Paleolithic man
Observed an irate mammoth—
Observed how his neighbors ran:
And he sat on a naked boulder
Where the plains stretched out to the sun,
And jowl in hand he frowned and planned
As none before had done.