AUTUMN MELODY
In the autumn days, the days of parting,
Days that in a golden silence fall,
When the air is quick with bird-wings starting,
And the asters darken by the wall;
Strong and sweet the wine of heaven is flowing,
Bees and sun and sleep and golden dyes;
Long forgot is budding-time and blowing,
Sunk in honeyed sleep the garden lies.
Spring and storm and summer midnight madness
Dream within the grape but never wake;
Bees and sun and sweetness,—oh, and sadness!
Sun and sweet that reach the heart—and break.
Ah, the pain at heart forever starting,
Ah, the cup untasted that we spilled
In the autumn days, the days of parting!
Would our shades could drink it, and be stilled.
PRAIRIE SPRING
Evening and the flat land,
Rich and somber and always silent;
The miles of fresh-plowed soil,
Heavy and black, full of strength and harshness;
The growing wheat, the growing weeds,
The toiling horses, the tired men;
The long, empty roads,
Sullen fires of sunset, fading,
The eternal, unresponsive sky.
Against all this, Youth,
Flaming like the wild roses,
Singing like the larks over the plowed fields,
Flashing like a star out of the twilight;
Youth with its insupportable sweetness,
Its fierce necessity,
Its sharp desire;
Singing and singing,
Out of the lips of silence,
Out of the earthy dusk.
MACON PRAIRIE
(NEBRASKA)
She held me for a night against her bosom,
The aunt who died when I was yet a baby,
The girl who scarcely lived to be a woman.
Stricken, she left familiar earth behind her,
Mortally ill, she braved the boisterous ocean,
Dying, she crossed irrevocable rivers,
Hailed the blue Lakes, and saw them fade forever,
Hungry for distances;—her heart exulting
That God had made so many seas and countries
To break upon the eye and sweep behind her.
From one whose love was tempered by discretion,
From all the net of caution and convenience
She snatched her high heart for the great adventure,
Broke her bright bubble under far horizons,—
Among the skirmishers that teased the future,
Precursors of the grave slow-moving millions
Already destined to the Westward-faring.
They came, at last, to where the railway ended,
The strange troop captained by a dying woman;
The father, the old man of perfect silence,
The mother, unresisting, broken-hearted,
The gentle brother and his wife, both timid,
Not knowing why they left their native hamlet;
Going as in a dream, but ever going.