SONNET TO ARTHUR FICKE

To Arthur Ficke be these words addressed:
He is a son too of that middle land
Where I was reared, by wide horizons spanned,
And laved by rivers of the boundless West.
Now not disloyal, rather dispossessed
Of native doors, we find what youth had planned
Confused in changing days, none understand,
In the East, still striving, still upon the quest.
If after years of health and working power,
If after various toil my days must be
Sunk in declining strength, in poverty,
He and some others know about my hour
Given to freedom and to poetry,
Though stern disaster wither down its flower.

April 10 1939.

STARVED ROCK IN WINTER

The vastness of the valley seems more vast
When snow prevails with quiet majesty,
Making time seem as if it ceased to be
About this Rock that takes the winter blast.

Summer has echoes, but now the canyons sound
With a single bird call. On the river's breast
Mergansers sit like penguins at rest,
An eagle soars above the enchanted ground,

Flying in an ether of purest blue,
Which makes the snow-bound landscape still more white;
And in this sky are gulls, whose wings in flight
Sail half immovable, and still pursue

Some quest around the Rock, where coral buds
Gleam from the snow, and where the cedars gnarled
Bring green into the silver, where the gnarled
Blue-berry bushes deaden the sleeping woods.

Water has dripped and frozen, and many hues
Merge in the icicles, russet, blue and green:
They hang against the Rock's brown walls, between
The lichens, liverworts, their colors fuse

Into a rainbow splendor, while the stream
Takes the reflection of the sky, combines
Its iron color with the verdant pines,
Where one sole chickadee breaks the mesmeric dream.

But silence is here, silence as if the dead,
As if past years descended here to lock
The land about, the river and the Rock
Against all bound except the rabbit's tread,

The squirrel's cough, the cawing of the crow,
The chickadee that rustles the hazel bush:
All else is silence, and in an enchanted hush
Of a valley asleep under the winter snow.

January 21st 1941.