C.D. Warner, et al., comp.
The Library of the World’s Best Literature. An Anthology in Thirty Volumes. 1917.

Feud

From ‘Poems’

A MILE of lane,—hedged high with ironweeds

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 no 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 briars; 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 burrs

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,—

The place seems thinking of that time of fear

And dares not breathe a sound.

Within is emptiness: the sunlight falls

On faded journals papering the walls;

On advertisement chromos, torn with time,

Around a hearth where wasps and spiders build.—

The house is dead: meseems that night of crime

It, too, was shot and killed.