Your faces change as I carry your thoughts through the ebb and flow
Of someone’s joys, and someone’s hopes, and I love to watch the glow
In Marjory’s eyes as we talk of elves in their wild and wanton glee,
When they make the dim old forest ring with the sound of revelry.
But May cares only to listen when I tell some quaint home tale,
She likes a cot on a wooded hill, and flocks of sheep in the vale,
While you, my lad, with the dreamy eyes, you love the prose and the rhyme,
The deeds of daring, the deeds of might, of good King Arthur’s time.
To-day May asked me a question, and I’ve pondered it for hours,
God’s acre, she said, is full of bloom—do the dead folks turn to flowers?
There’s a tender story, my children, that may comfort you some day
When mother sleeps in God’s acre, and the flowers blossom gay.
The soft-voiced angels of Life and Love they whispered to Christ one day
We pray Thee that when one fair and good in the earth is laid away,
That we in the golden dawn may go alone where the sleeper lies,
And sing in the solemn silence the songs learned in Paradise.”
Answered Christ, “Go sing till comes springing up, up from the sod beneath,
The lily, white as a ransomed soul, the rose with its fragrant breath.”
A silence fell on the little group, there were tears in Marjory’s eyes,
It was a wonderful story, and mother was O, so wise!
Then the wee girl clapped her dimpled hands, and said in her loving way,
“When you turn to a posy, mamma, I’ll water you every day.”
It was such a pretty story I wove it into a rhyme,
To read to myself, when the skies were grey, at the end of summertime.
In Lover’s Lane
O, ranting bully with clamorous breath,
O, vandal, why come you down from the North
With frost in your breath, and wrath in your voice,
And force in your arms to level and toss?
You rush through the wood and threaten the trees—
The giants of oak, of beech, and of elm,
Playmates of yours ere age had o’ertaken,
Stolen their vigor, their sap, and their life.
The tender child-trees, the slender child-trees
You worry, you beat, you fling to the earth,
Lithe and supple are they to defy you,
Swiftly they spring up as soon as you pass,
Trembling a little with fear and anger,
But whole and unhurt—the slender young things!