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or snow.

Oh, let’s not wait for rain to make it safe.

The pile is ours: we dragged it bough on bough

Down dark converging paths between the pines.

Let’s not care what we do with it to-night.

Divide it? No! But burn it as one pile

The way we piled it. And let’s be the talk

Of people brought to windows by a light

Thrown from somewhere against their wall-paper.

Rouse them all, both the free and not so free

With saying what they’d like to do to us

For what they’d better wait till we have done.

Let’s all but bring to life this old volcano,

If that is what the mountain ever was––

And scare ourselves. Let wild fire loose we will....”

 

“And scare you too?” the children said together.

 

“Why wouldn’t it scare me to have a fire

Begin in smudge with ropy smoke and know

That still, if I repent, I may recall it,

But in a moment not: a little spurt

Of burning fatness, and then nothing but

The fire itself can put it out, and that

By burning out, and before it burns out

It will have roared first and mixed sparks with stars,

And sweeping round it with a flaming sword,

Made the dim trees stand back in wider circle––

42

Done so much and I know not how much more

I mean it shall not do if I can bind it.

Well if it doesn’t with its draft bring on

A wind to blow in earnest from some quarter,

As once it did with me upon an April.

The breezes were so spent with winter blowing

They seemed to fail the bluebirds under them

Short of the perch their languid flight was toward;

And my flame made a pinnacle to heaven

As I walked once round it in possession.

But the wind out of doors––you know the saying.

There came a gust. You used to think the trees

Made wind by fanning since you never knew

It blow but that you saw the trees in motion.

Something or someone watching made that gust.

It put the flame tip-down and dabbed the grass

Of over-winter with the least tip-touch

Your tongue gives salt or sugar in your hand.

The place it reached to blackened instantly.

The black was all there was by day-light,

That and the merest curl of cigarette smoke––

And a flame slender as the hepaticas,

Blood-root, and violets so soon to be now.

But the black spread like black death on the ground,

And I think the sky darkened with a cloud

Like winter and evening coming on together.

There were enough things to be thought of then.

Where the field stretches toward the north

And setting sun to Hyla brook, I gave it

To flames without twice thinking, where it verges

Upon the road, to flames too, though in fear

They might find fuel there, in withered brake,

Grass its full length, old silver golden-rod,

And alder and grape vine entanglement,

To leap the dusty deadline. For my own

43

I took what front there was beside. I knelt

And thrust hands in and held my face away.

Fight such a fire by rubbing not by beating.

A board is the best weapon if you have it.

I had my coat. And oh, I knew, I knew,

And said out loud, I couldn’t bide the smother

And heat so close in; but the thought of all

The woods and town on fire by me, and all

The town turned out to fight for me––that held me.

I trusted the brook barrier, but feared

The road would fail; and on that side the fire

Died not without a noise of crackling wood––

Of something more than tinder-grass and weed––

That brought me to my feet to hold it back

By leaning back myself, as if the reins

Were round my neck and I was at the plough.

I won! But I’m sure no one ever spread

Another color over a tenth the space

That I spread coal-black over in the time

It took me. Neighbors coming home from town

Couldn’t believe that so much black had come there

While they had backs turned, that it hadn’t been there

When they had passed an hour or so before

Going the other way and they not seen it.

They looked about for someone to have done it.

But there was no one. I was somewhere wondering

Where all my weariness had gone and why

I walked so light on air in heavy shoes

In spite of a scorched Fourth-of-July feeling.

Why wouldn’t I be scared remembering that?”

 

“If it scares you, what will it do to us?”

 

“Scare you. But if you shrink from being scared,

What would you say to war if it should come?

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That’s what for reasons I should like to know––

If you can comfort me by any answer.”

 

“Oh, but war’s not for children––it’s for men.”

 

“Now we are digging almost down to China.

My dears, my dears, you thought that––we all thought it.

So your mistake was ours. Haven’t you heard, though,

About the ships where war has found them out

At sea, about the towns where war has come

Through opening clouds at night with droning speed

Further o’erhead than all but stars and angels,––

And children in the ships and in the towns?

Haven’t you heard what we have lived to learn?

Nothing so new––something we had forgotten:

War is for everyone, for children too.

I wasn’t going to tell you and I mustn’t.

The best way is to come up hill with me

And have our fire and laugh and be afraid.”

45 A GIRL’S GARDEN

A neighbor of mine in the village

Likes to tell how one spring

When she was a girl on the farm, she did

A childlike thing.

 

One day she asked her father

To give her a garden plot

To plant and tend and reap herself,

And he said, “Why not?”

 

In casting about for a corner

He thought of an idle bit

Of walled-off ground where a shop had stood,

And he said, “Just it.”

 

And he said, “That ought to make you

An ideal one-girl farm,

And give you a chance to put some strength

On your slim-jim arm.”

 

It was not enough of a garden,

Her father said, to plough;

So she had to work it all by hand,

But she don’t mind now.

 

46

She wheeled the dung in the wheelbarrow

Along a stretch of road;

But she always ran away and left

Her not-nice load.

 

And hid from anyone passing.

And then she begged the seed.

She says she thinks she planted one

Of all things but weed.

 

A hill each of potatoes,

Radishes, lettuce, peas,

Tomatoes, beets, beans, pumpkins, corn,

And even fruit trees.

 

And yes, she has long mistrusted

That a cider apple tree

In bearing there to-day is hers,

Or at least may be.

 

Her crop was a miscellany

When all was said and done,

A little bit of everything,

A great deal of none.

 

Now when she sees in the village

How village things go,

Just when it seems to come in right,

She says, “I know!

 

47

It’s as when I was a farmer–––”

Oh, never by way of advice!

And she never sins by telling the tale

To the same person twice.

48 THE EXPOSED NEST

You were forever finding some new play.

So when I saw you down on hands and knees

In the meadow, busy with the new-cut hay,

Trying, I thought, to set it up on end,

I went to show you how to make it stay,

If that was your idea, against the breeze,

And, if you asked me, even help pretend

To make it root again and grow afresh.

But ’twas no make-believe with you to-day,

Nor was the grass itself your real concern,

Though I found your hand full of wilted fern,

Steel-bright June-grass, and blackening heads of clover.

’Twas a nest full of young birds on the ground

The cutter-bar had just gone champing over

(Miraculously without tasting flesh)

And left defenseless to the heat and light.

You wanted to restore them to their right

Of something interposed between their sight

And too much world at once––could means be found.

The way the nest-full every time we stirred

Stood up to us as to a mother-bird

Whose coming home has been too long deferred,

Made me ask would the mother-bird return

And care for them in such a change of scene

And might our meddling make her more afraid.

That was a thing we could not wait to learn.

We saw the risk we took in doing good,

But dared not spare to do the best we could

Though harm should come of it; so built the screen

49

You had begun, and gave them back their shade.

All this to prove we cared. Why is there then

No more to tell? We turned to other things.

I haven’t any memory––have you?––

Of ever coming to the place again

To see if the birds lived the first night through,

And so at last to learn to use their wings.

50 “OUT, OUT––”

The buzz-saw snarled and rattled in the yard

And made dust and dropped stove-length sticks of wood,

Sweet-scented stuff when the breeze drew across it.

And from there those that lifted eyes could count

Five mountain ranges one behind the other

Under the sunset far into Vermont.

And the saw snarled and rattled, snarled and rattled,

As it ran light, or had to bear a load.

And nothing happened: day was all but done.

Call it a day, I wish they might have said

To please the boy by giving him the half hour

That a boy counts so much when saved from work.

His sister stood beside them in her apron

To tell them “Supper.” At the word, the saw,

As if to prove saws knew what supper meant,

Leaped out at the boy’s hand, or seemed to leap––

He must have given the hand. However it was,

Neither refused the meeting. But the hand!

The boy’s first outcry was a rueful laugh,

As he swung toward them holding up the hand

Half in appeal, but half as if to keep

The life from spilling. Then the boy saw all––

Since he was old enough to know, big boy

Doing a man’s work, though a child at heart––

He saw all spoiled. “Don’t let him cut my hand off––

The doctor, when he comes. Don’t let him, sister!”

So. But the hand was gone already.

The doctor put him in the dark of ether.

He lay and puffed his lips out with his breath.

51

And then––the watcher at his pulse took fright.

No one believed. They listened at his heart.

Little––less––nothing!––and that ended it.

No more to build on there. And they, since they

Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.

52 BROWN’S DESCENT

or
THE WILLY-NILLY SLIDE

Brown lived at such a lofty farm

That everyone for miles could see

His lantern when he did his chores

In winter after half-past three.

 

And many must have seen him make

His wild descent from there one night,

’Cross lots, ’cross walls, ’cross everything,

Describing rings of lantern light.

 

Between the house and barn the gale

Got

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