Sunburnt Boys
Down on the Lumbee river
Where the eddies ripple cool
Your boat, I know, glides stealthily
About some shady pool.
The summer's heats have lulled asleep
The fish-hawk's chattering noise,
And all the swamp lies hushed about
You sunburnt boys.
You see the minnow's waves that rock
The cradled lily leaves.
From a far field some farmer's song,
Singing among his sheaves,
Comes mellow to you where you sit,
Each man with boatman's poise,
There, in the shimmering water lights,
You sunburnt boys.
I know your haunts: each gnarly bole
That guards the waterside,
Each tuft of flags and rushes where
The river reptiles hide,
Each dimpling nook wherein the bass
His eager life employs
Until he dies—the captive of
You sunburnt boys.
You will not—will you?—soon forget
When I was one of you,
Nor love me less that time has borne
My craft to currents new;
Nor shall I ever cease to share
Your hardships and your joys,
Robust, rough-spoken, gentle-hearted
Sunburnt boys!
Gray Days
A soaking sedge,
A faded field, a leafless hill and hedge,
Low clouds and rain,
And loneliness and languor worse than pain.
Mottled with moss,
Each gravestone holds to heaven a patient Cross.
Shrill streaks of light
Two sycamores' clean-limbed, funereal white,
And low between,
The sombre cedar and the ivy green.
Upon the stone
Of each in turn who called this land his own
The gray rain beats
And wraps the wet world in its flying sheets,
And at my eaves
A slow wind, ghostlike, comes and grieves and grieves.
An Invalid
I care not what his name for God may be,
Nor what his wisdom holds of heaven and hell,
The alphabet whereby he strives to spell
His lines of life, nor where he bends his knee,
Since, with his grave before him, he can see
White Peace above it, while the churchyard bell
Poised in its tower, poised now, to boom his knell,
Seems but the waiting tongue of liberty.
For names and knowledge, idle breed of breath,
And cant and creed, the progeny of strife,
Thronging the safe, companioned streets of life,
Shrink trembling from the cold, clear eye of death,
And learn too late why dying lips can smile:
That goodness is the only creed worth while.