 | [Poems by Cary in] The poems of Alice and Phoebe Cary |  |
APRIL.
If, in the sunshine of this April morn,Thick as the furrows of the unsown corn,
I saw the grave-mounds darkening in the way
That I have come, I would not therefore lay
My brow against their shadows. Sadly brown
May fade the boughs once blowing brightly down
About my playing; never any more
May fall my knocking on the homestead door,
And never more the wild birds (pretty things)
Against my yellow primrose beds their wings
May nearly slant, as singing toward the woods
They fly in summer. Shall I hence take moods
Of moping melancholy—sobbings wild
For the blue modest eyes, that sweetly lit
All my lost youth? Nay! though this rhyme were writ
By funeral torches, I would yet have smiled
Betwixt the verses. God is good, I know;
And though in this bad soil a time we grow
Crooked and ugly, all the ends of things
Must be in beauty. Love can work no ill;
And though we see the shadow of its wings
Only at times, shall we not trust it still!
So, even for the dead I will not bind
My soul to grief: Death cannot long divide;
For is it not as if the rose that climbed
My garden wall, had bloomed the other side?
| [Poems by Cary in] The poems of Alice and Phoebe Cary | |