Time out
It took that pause to make him realize The mountain he was climbing had the slant As of a book held up before his eyes (And was a text albeit done in plant.) Dwarf cornel, gold-thread, and maianthemum,
He followingly fingered as he read,
The flowers fading on the seed to come;
But the thing was the slope it gave his head:
The same for reading as it was for thought,
So different from the hard and level stare
Of enemies defied and battles fought.
It was the obstinately gentle air
That may be clamored at by cause and sect
But it will have its moment to reflect.

TO A MOTH SEEN IN WINTER
HERE'S first a gloveless hand warm from my pocket,
A perch and resting place 'twixt wood and wood,
Bright-black-eyed silvery creature, brushed with brown,
The wings not folded in repose, but spread. (Who would you be,
I wonder, by those marks If I had moths to friend as I have flowers?) And now pray tell what lured you with false hope To make the venture of eternity And seek the love of kind in winter time? But stay and hear me out.
I surely think You make a labor of flight for one so airy,
Spending yourself too much in self-support.
Nor will you find love either nor love you.
And what I pity in you is something human,
The old incurable untimeliness,
Only begetter of all ills that are.
But go.
You are right.
My pity cannot help.
Go till you wet your pinions and are quenched.
You must be made more simply wise than I To know the hand I stretch impulsively Across the gulf of well nigh everything May reach to you, but cannot touch your fate.
I cannot touch your life, much less can save,
Who am tasked to save my own a little while.
circa 1900 THE GIFT OUTRIGHT
THE land was ours before we were the land's.
She was our land more than a hundred years Before we were her people.
She was ours In Massachusetts, in Virginia,
But we were England's, still colonials,
Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,
Possessed by what we now no more possessed.
Something we were withholding made us weak Until we found it was ourselves We were withholding from our land of living,
And forthwith found salvation in surrender.
Such as we were we gave ourselves outright (The deed of gift was many deeds of war) To the land vaguely realizing westward,
But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,
Such as she was, such as she might become.