Cactus and pine: Songs of the Southwest

by Sharlot Mabridth Hall

IN OLD TUCSON

In old Tucson, in old Tucson,
How swift the happy days ran on!
How warm the yellow sunshine beat
Along the white caliche street!
The flat roofs caught a brighter sheen
From fringing house leeks thick and green,
And chiles drying in the sun;
Splashes of crimson ’gainst the dun
Of clay-spread roof and earthen floor;
The squash vine climbing past the door
Held in its yellow blossoms deep
The drowsy desert bees asleep.
By one low wall, at one shut gate,
The dusty roadway turned to wait;
The pack mules loitered, passing where
The muleteers had sudded care
Of cinche and pack and harness bell.
The oleander blossoms fell,
Wind-drifted flecks of flame and snow;
The fruited pomegranate swung low;
And in the patio dim and cool
The gray doves flitted round the pool
That caught her image lightly as
The face that fades across a glass.
In old Tucson, in old Tucson,
The pool is dry, the face is gone.
No dark eyes through the lattice shine,
No slim brown hand steals through to mine;
There where her oleander stood
The twilight shadows bend and brood,
And through the glossed pomegranate leaves
The wind remembering waits and grieves;
Waits with me, knowing as I know,
She may not choose to come and go—
She who with life no more has part
Save in the dim pool of my heart.
And yet I wait, and yet I see
The dream that was come back to me;
The green leek springs above the roof,
The dove that mourned alone, aloof,
Flutes softly to her mate among
The fig leaves where the fruit has hung
Slow-purpling through the sunny days;
And down the golden desert haze
The mule bells tinkle faint and far;—
But where her candle shone, a star;
And where I watched her shadow fall,—
The gray street and a crumbling wall.

THE LITTLE HOUSE OF MARY

Throughout the desert region of the Southwest are abandoned mining camps; shafts caved, machinery silent and rusting away, sand drifted in the long-empty cabins. In one such deserted camp a child’s play-house was found beside a great bowlder, the little toys and treasures undisturbed through all the years.

The hoof-worn pack trails still wind down past barren cliff and ledge,
And fail and fade like water spilled at the sage gray desert’s edge;
Lost in the shifting sand banks, clear where the long dykes lift
Their rough, brown, sun-burned shoulders out of the wind-blown drift.
Like scars long-healed the weed-grown dumps where the miners plied their craft,
And the tuna drops its crimson fruit down the mouth of the caving shaft.
A broken shovel, a worn-out pick—and down in the gulch below
A lean coyote homes her whelps where the stamps beat blow on blow.
Where the tent camp took its careless way to the rocky cañon’s brink,
The plumed quail leads her covey, and the wild deer come to drink;
But then the mule bells tinkled, and, proud of her rank and place,
The old white bell mare took the lead, setting the train its pace.
And close by a gray-ribbed bowlder, shading her eyes with her hands,
Watching the ore trains passing out to the unknown lands,
A little, wistful figure with dreaming, gentle face,
Like a flower from some old-time garden abloom in that rugged place.
Child of the sun-white desert; no other land she knew;
Its cactus and sage were her greenest green; its skies were her deepest blue;
The shy, wild things were her playmates, and under the old cleft stone
She builded a little kingdom for her and them alone.
And here are her guarded treasures, quaint little shapes of clay,
Fashioned by small brown fingers as she sang at her lonely play;—
But the dust lies thick upon them, and sand drifts bar the door,
And only a swift green lizard shimmers across the floor.
Like memories worn too deep to lose the pack trail still winds down,
Out past the old gray bowlder and the ledges seamed and brown;
Till here it swerves a hand-width back, where once the rough cross stood,
With a child’s brief name and a child’s scant years carved in the sun-bleached wood.
The cross is fallen and crumbling, but still the wild quails call
As if they missed a comrade through the sage brush thick and tall;
And where the love vine tangles and the wind croons low at even,
The little playhouse waits for her, for “Mary, aged seven.”

THE SONG OF THE PINE

Hear now the song of the pine
That is sung when strong winds sweep
Hot-flung from the mighty South,
Or the North Wind bellows deep:
Hear thou the song of the pine
When the sea-wet West beats in,
Or the East from his tether breaks
With clamorous, human din.
The long boughs quiver and shake,
Uproused from their primal ease,
And bend as an organ reed
When a strong hand strikes the keys;
And a mighty hymn rolls forth
To the far hills farthest line,
Earth’s challenge and trumpet call—
Hear now the song of the pine.

The strong gray hills are my throne, the rock-ribbed thews of the earth;
There have I marshalled my brethren, and laughed at wind and sun;
I tent with the crag and the eagle; the Cloud Gods saw my birth;
I have drunk the strength of ages—a thousand years as one.
I have warred with rift and crevice, with avalanche and shale,
Grappling my barren ridge with the grip of a mail-clad fist;
Storms roll their anger around me, torn through with lightnings pale,
Or robe me in lonely ermine, or garb me with sodden mist.
The stars are my near companions; ever to them I lift,
And grow to their nightly splendor with soul as far and free;
Counting the swinging seasons by the planet’s veer and drift,
Till again the wild Spring-Joy wells up from the earth to me:—
The old, fierce joy of living, all primitive, undenied;
As breathed from the Maker’s lips on clay still warm with its touch;
When no soul skulked or whimpered, or in impotent weakness cried,
And life was a strong man’s gift to be held in an iron clutch.
Held—or flung down as the pine-top shakes down a ripened cone;
Then stretches green fingers skyward with larger faith and hope;
Glad without thought or question, undoubtful of earth or sun,
From the bent blue overhead to the mold where the dark roots grope.
But level sinketh to level as height calls up to height;
Courage is born of danger; the deed of the naked need;
Came Ease to sit on the hearth, dear-bought with the ancient might,
And drunk with her smile men slept and lapsed to a weaker breed,
O men that dream in the lowland, men that drowse in the plain,
Wake ye, and turn to the forest, turn to the far, high hills;
Ye shall win from their unspent greatness the olden strength again;
Ye shall hear in that lofty silence the battle shout that thrills.
Ye shall find in those utmost reaches power undefiled;
Wisdom untaught of sages, and patience and truth divine;
Life tameless still; untainted; primal and potent and wild—
Rouse ye, nor linger belittled,—shamed by the wind-swung pine.

SHEEP HERDING

A gray, slow-moving, dust-bepowdered wave,
That on the edges breaks to scattering spray,
Round which the faithful collies wheel and bark
To scurry in the laggard feet that stray:
A babel of complaining tongues that make
The dull air weary with their ceaseless fret;
Brown hills akin to those of Gallilee
On which the shepherds tend their charges yet.
The long, hot days; the stark, wind-beaten nights;
No human presence, human sight or sound;
Grim, silent land of wasted hopes, where they
Who came for gold oft times have madness found;
A bleating horror that fore-gathers speech;
Freezing the word that from the lip would pass;
And sends the herdsman grovelling with his sheep,
Face down and beast-like on the trampled grass.