 | The poems of Madison Cawein |  |
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III
OWL ROOST
The slope is a mass of vines:
If you walk in the daylight there,
A gleam as of twilight shines
Through the vines massed everywhere:
Each trunk, that a creeper twines,
Is a column, strong to bear
The dome of its leaves that wave,
Cathedral-dim and grave.
If you walk in the daylight there,
A gleam as of twilight shines
Through the vines massed everywhere:
Each trunk, that a creeper twines,
Is a column, strong to bear
The dome of its leaves that wave,
Cathedral-dim and grave.
Black moss makes silent the feet:
And, above, the fox-grapes lace
So thick that the noonday heat
Is chill as a murdered face:
And the winds for miles repeat
The fugue of a rolling bass:
The deep leaves twinkle and turn
But over no flower or fern.
And, above, the fox-grapes lace
So thick that the noonday heat
Is chill as a murdered face:
And the winds for miles repeat
The fugue of a rolling bass:
The deep leaves twinkle and turn
But over no flower or fern.
An angular spider weaves
Great webs between the trees,
Webs that are witches' sieves:
And honey-and bumblebees
Go droning among the leaves,
Like the fairies' oboës:
At dark the owlets croon
To the stars and the sickle-moon.
Great webs between the trees,
Webs that are witches' sieves:
And honey-and bumblebees
Go droning among the leaves,
Like the fairies' oboës:
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To the stars and the sickle-moon.
At dark I will not go
There where the branches sigh;
Where naught but the glow-worms glow,
Each one like a demon's eye:
O'er which, like a battle-bow,
With an arrow that it lets fly,
The new-moon and one star
Hang and glimmer afar.
There where the branches sigh;
Where naught but the glow-worms glow,
Each one like a demon's eye:
O'er which, like a battle-bow,
With an arrow that it lets fly,
The new-moon and one star
Hang and glimmer afar.
At dawn, if my mood be dim,
And the day be a cloudless one,
There where the sad winds hymn
I'll walk, but its shade will shun;
Its shade, where I feel the grim
Horror of something done
Here in the years long past,
That the place conceals to the last.
And the day be a cloudless one,
There where the sad winds hymn
I'll walk, but its shade will shun;
Its shade, where I feel the grim
Horror of something done
Here in the years long past,
That the place conceals to the last.
| The poems of Madison Cawein | |