Three of us without a care
In the red September
Tramping down the roads of Maine,
Making merry with the rain,
With the fellow winds a-fare
Where the winds remember.
Three of us with shocking hats,
Tattered and unbarbered,
Happy with the splash of mud,
With the highways in our blood,
Bearing down on Deacon Platt's
Where last year we harbored.
We've come down from Kennebec,
Tramping since last Sunday,
Loping down the coast of Maine,
With the sea for a refrain,
And the maples neck and neck
All the way to Fundy.
Sometimes lodging in an inn,
Cosey as a dormouse--
Sometimes sleeping on a knoll
With no rooftree but the Pole--
Sometimes halely welcomed in
At an old-time farmhouse.
Loafing under ledge and tree,
Leaping over boulders,
Sitting on the pasture bars,
Hail-fellow with storm or stars--
Three of us alive and free,
With unburdened shoulders!
Three of us with hearts like pine
That the lightnings splinter,
Clean of cleave and white of grain--
Three of us afoot again,
With a rapture fresh and fine
As a spring in winter!
All the hills are red and gold;
And the horns of vision
Call across the crackling air
Till we shout back to them there,
Taken captive in the hold
Of their bluff derision.
Spray-salt gusts of ocean blow
From the rocky headlands;
Overhead the wild geese fly,
Honking in the autumn sky;
Black sinister flocks of crow
Settle on the dead lands.
Three of us in love with life,
Roaming like wild cattle,
With the stinging air a-reel
As a warrior might feel
The swift orgasm of the knife
Slay him in mid-battle.
Three of us to march abreast
Down the hills of morrow!
With a clean heart and a few
Friends to clench the spirit to!--
Leave the gods to rule the rest,
And good-by, sorrow!
WOOD-FOLK LORE. To T. B. M.
For every one
Beneath the sun,
Where Autumn walks with quiet eyes,
There is a word,
Just overheard
When hill to purple hill replies.
This afternoon,
As warm as June,
With the red apples on the bough,
I set my ear
To hark and hear
The wood-folk talking, you know how.
There comes a "Hush!"
And then a "Tush,"
As tree to scarlet tree responds,
"Babble away!
He'll not betray
The secrets of us vagabonds.
"Are we not all,
Both great and small,
Cousins and kindred in a joy
No school can teach,
No worldling reach,
Nor any wreck of chance destroy?"
And so we are,
However far
We journey ere the journey ends,
One brotherhood
With leaf and bud
And everything that wakes or wends.
The wind that blows
My autumn rose
Where Grand Pré looks to Blomidon,--
How great must be
The company
Of roses he has leaned upon,
Since first he shed
Their petals red
Through Persian gardens long ago,
When Omar heard
His muttered word
Rumoring things we may not know!
Our brother ghost,
He is a most
Incorrigible wanderer;
And still to-day
He takes his way
About my hills of spruce and fir;
Will neither bide
By the great tide,
In apple lands of Acadie,
Nor in the leaves
About your eaves,
Where Scituate looks out to sea.