Читать книгу Weeds by the Wall: Verses - Cawein Madison Julius - Страница 17

A mile of lane, – hedged high with iron-weeds

And dying daisies, – white with sun, that leads

Downward into a wood; through which a stream

Steals like a shadow; over which is laid

A bridge of logs, worn deep by many a team,

Sunk in the tangled shade.

Far off a wood-dove lifts its lonely cry;

And in the sleepy silver of the sky

A gray hawk wheels scarce larger than a hand.

From point to point the road grows worse and worse,

Until that place is reached where all the land

Seems burdened with some curse.

A ragged fence of pickets, warped and sprung, —

On which the fragments of a gate are hung, —

Divides a hill, the fox and ground-hog haunt,

A wilderness of briers; o'er whose tops

A battered barn is seen, low-roofed and gaunt,

'Mid fields that know no crops.

Fields over which a path, o'erwhelmed with burs

And ragweeds, noisy with the grasshoppers,

Leads, – lost, irresolute as paths the cows

Wear through the woods, – unto a woodshed; then,

With wrecks of windows, to a huddled house,

Where men have murdered men.

A house, whose tottering chimney, clay and rock,

Is seamed and crannied; whose lame door and lock

Are bullet-bored; around which, there and here,

Are sinister stains. – One dreads to look around. —