 | The complete poems of S. Weir Mitchell |  |
343
THE CARRY
NIPIGON
Blue is the sky overhead,Blue with the northland's pallor,
Never a cloud in sight,
Naught but the moon's gray sickle;
And ever around me, gray,
Ashes, and rock, and lichen.
Far as the sick eye searches
Ghastly trunks, that were trees once,
Up to their bony branches
Carry the gray of ruin.
Lo! where across the mountain
Swept the scythe of the wind-fall,
Moss of a century's making
Lies on this death-swath lonely,
Where in grim heaps the wood sachems,
Like to the strange dead of battle,
Stay, with their limbs ever rigid
Set in the doom-hour of anguish.
Far and away o'er this waste land
Wanders a trail through gray boulders,
Brown to the distant horizon.
1870.
| The complete poems of S. Weir Mitchell | |