Madison Cawein

BRIAR and fennel and chincapin,

And rue and ragweed everywhere;

The field seemed sick as a soul with sin,

Or dead of an old despair,

Born of an ancient care.

The cricket’s cry and the locust’s whirr,

And the note of a bird’s distress,

With the rasping sound of the grasshopper,

Clung to the loneliness

Like burrs to a trailing dress.

So sad the field, so waste the ground,

So curst with an old despair,

A woodchuck’s burrow, a blind mole’s mound,

And a chipmunk’s stony lair,

Seemed more than it could bear.

So lonely, too, so more than sad,

So droning-lone with bees—

I wondered what more could Nature add

To the sum of its miseries …

And then—I saw the trees.

Skeletons gaunt that gnarled the place,

Twisted and torn they rose—

The tortured bones of a perished race

Of monsters no mortal knows,

They startled the mind’s repose.

And a man stood there, as still as moss,

A lichen form that stared;

With an old blind hound that, at a loss,

Forever around him fared

With a snarling fang half bared.

I looked at the man; I saw him plain;

Like a dead weed, gray and wan,

Or a breath of dust. I looked again—

And man and dog were gone,

Like wisps of the graying dawn….

Were they a part of the grim death there—

Ragweed, fennel, and rue?

Or forms of the mind, an old despair,

That there into semblance grew

Out of the grief I knew?