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From “The Box of God”
O EAGLE whose whistling wings have known the lift | |
| Of high mysterious hands, and the wild sweet music | |
| Of big winds among the ultimate stars, | |
| The black-robes put you in a box of God, | |
| Seeking in honest faith and holy zeal | 5 |
| To lay upon your lips new songs, to swell | |
| The chorus of amens and hallelujahs. | |
| O bundle of copper bones tossed in a hole, | |
| Here in the place-of-death—God’s fenced-in ground!— | |
| Beneath these put-in pines and waxen lilies, | 10 |
| They placed you in a crimson gash in the hillside, | |
| Here on a bluff above the Sleepy-eye, | |
| Where the Baptism River, mumbling among the canyons, | |
| Shoulders its flood through crooning waterfalls | |
| In a mist of wafted foam fragile as petals | 15 |
| Of windflowers blowing across the green of April; | |
| Where ghosts of wistful leaves go floating up | |
| In the rustling blaze of autumn, like silver smokes | |
| Slenderly twisting among the thin blue winds; | |
| Here in the great gray arms of Mont du Père, | 20 |
| Where the shy arbutus, the mink, and the Johnny-jump-up | |
| Huddle and whisper of a long, long winter; | |
| Where stars, with soundless feet, come trooping up | |
| To dance to the water-drums of white cascades— | |
| Where stars, like little children, go singing down | 25 |
| The sky to the flute of the wind in the willow-tree— | |
| Somebody—somebody’s there … O pagan Joe … | |
| Can’t you see Him as He moves among the mountains— | |
| Where dusk, dew-lidded, slips among the valleys | |
| Soft as a blue wolf walking in thick wet moss? | 30 |
| Look!… my friend!… at the breast of Mont du Père!… | |
| Sh-sh-sh-sh!… Don’t you hear His talking waters … | |
| Soft in the gloam as broken butterflies | |
| Hovering above a somber pool?… Sh-sh-sh-sh! | |
| Somebody’s there … in the heart of Mont du Père … | 35 |
| Somebody—somebody’s there, sleeping … sleeping … | |
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