Decoration

By EDWILDA NORDAHL

Tall, coarse and wild the blue grass grows, And warm the sunshine lies;

Across the corn the south wind blows,

High lift summer skies.

The roses on the graves spread wide,
Where few come now, to see

Old neighbors, lying side by side,
In peaceful amity.

The rich man's stone has fallen down,

His grave has sunken low;

And over yonder unmarked mound

The flaming wild pinks grow.

The rusted padlock on the gate,

No longer knows the key;
Behind the sumac live and mate
The little wild things, free.

The crow builds in the cedar high,

The thrush nests in the thorn,

And where old, crumbling sandstones lie,

The rabbit's young are born.

And what do they, sound sleeping there,

Of truce or conflict know;

Or for the little flags have care,
Above them in a row?

On Hearing Vachel Lindsay, with a Friend

By EDITH CHAPMAN

There was a look I caught upon your face,
That face as guarded as your spirit is,
As little prone to kindle and to blaze,
As little keen to ponder down the ways
Of vision and of fantasies, -

Yet, watching while you listened, in the place
Of so much calculation, such a sense

For present values; all your competence
And confidence and worldliness and scorn,
In place of these, - as if it scarce were born,
I caught the look of wonder on your face.

Abrupt, a little shrinking, unaware, —
Your spirit listening, tiptoe and astare,
It laid upon your arrogance a grace

Of startled conscious weakness. Oh, your face
With that wan look! Its eager, baffled ache
As of the soul awake.

I dared not watch you lest I cloud the star
Your eyes were seeing. But when now we are
Again together, faint above the glaze

Of your assurance and your bland, bright gaze,
On their resistant surface, I shall see

Gathering wistfully,

Then spread and deepen, with an alien grace,
A shadow - till it covers all your face.

Chief Lame-Bear Sings

By ELLIOTT C. LINCOLN

Why is the sunlight cold when it falls in the southopen door of my tepee?

Why is the night so long? Why do the wind-children wail so drearily?

Why have the hills grown gray and dead in the flush of the springtime?

O thou Great Spirit, tell me, for I would know!

Where are the buffalo? The grass grows rank and high in their dusting-places.

Where are the war chiefs? A badger is digging his den by the grave of my brother.

Where is the woman whose laugh I hear in the dreams of twilight?

O thou Great Spirit, tell me, for I would know!

I am an old man, torn by the hungry teeth of the summers and winters;

I am an old man, singing and playing the fool for a stranger people;

I am an old man, sick for the sight of the face of my mother.

Take me, O thou Great Spirit, for I would go!

By NELLIE BOURGET MILLER

THE COMING RAIN

Now with the breath of coming rain
The poplars sway, a troubled row,
Like old wives, rocking to and fro
In pain;

They shake their heads in shocked surprise

And whisper underneath their breath,

Like mourners in a house of death;

Then lift their aprons to their eyes
Again.

SUMMER NIGHT

One by one the Twilight drops her shrouding veils Before the throne of Night;

Amber, purple, amethyst, they fall,

A floating scarf of light;

Now wrapped in thinnest gauze of flame

She takes her stealthy flight.

Suddenly, one star flutters out bashfully,

Tremblingly toes the invisible mark
And fumbles her pinafore;

The heavens, empty, silent, but a breath before,

Have caught their cue

And marshal all their waiting hosts

In quick review

For Night's recurring pageantry.

By MARIE EMILIE GILCHRIST

THE HEADLANDS - IN OCTOBER

Soft gray that mounts into the clouds, the lake
Lies motionless beneath the autumn rain,

Save for the spreading fans of foam that break
And vanish through the sands with ebbing stain.
The oak-trees drop their ruddy wine-dark leaves;
One at a time they dip and swirl and pass
To that heaped garner where the earth receives
Her tithes, a soft and drifted rain-wet mass.
October and the poplars lift frail plumes

Dusted with golden sequins by the shore;
Waking the sweetness of old leaf-perfumes
The rain steps on the forest's russet floor;
While Autumn, with fulfillment in her eyes
Passes in majesty beneath gray skies.

NOVEMBER

Snow-heavy clouds lie piled above the hills,
Blue-gentian hills with leaf-brown hollow places;
Beneath the woodland trees are quiet spaces
Threaded by silent leaf-embedded rills.

The stubble fields have lost their silken hosts
Nor dream of seed through soft autumnal days,
Hedged in with mauve and scarlet raspberry sprays
And goldenrod, a woolen rustling ghost.

I once thought spring the loveliest, but now
These days of drowsihood and darkened skies
Reveal austerer grace to marvelling eyes
Shadowing beauty with a leafless bough.
And I grow humble, learning to revere
The infinite glories of the changing year.