I
The marvelous children
cut their pure ice capers
north of time.
Being very
restless expert skaters,
never did they trace
the same design twice over,
but each, completed,
had to be detached and lifted clean
on aerial derricks, green
and boned as swallows.
None wrote home,
no bulletins were issued of their progress
which he, the demon,
thought that he could block
with barricades of gold and purple tin foil labeled Fear
and other august titles which they took in their stride,
leapt over lightly,
always tossing backwards calls of gladness,
that echoed behind them long after they leapt
and were gone.
II
Much green water, rumorous and vague,
talked of their loss, discussed them in home quarters,
rolled ghostly tokens shorewards,
corduroy and lawn,
scraps of song,
unfinished arithmetic problems,
thumbprints on dog-eared books tossed into corners.
Mothers’ sorrow
often must be thorned
by soft bird language, earlier than morning,
snow brought indoors
in exchange for grandmothers’ cupboards of linen,
undignified, flung in every-which-a-direction,
shouts
that broke windows, orchards festooned
by something wilder than blossoms!
Oh mothers’ sorrow
grievously is pricked by jacks and apples of the earth’s
green-tongued refreshment,
storms that came on without warning, calls, calls,
running through orchards calling,
Come home! Come home!
before it gets dreadfully dark and hailstones fall
as big as goose eggs, nearly!
Stillness. Distance . . .
A spiral of dust,
a little upright figure
that bends and twists in curtsies, that does a pavan
that’s stately and gay and capricious,
is stalking about home plate as if he thought he owned it!
Now has begun
to hum, to whisper
the names of lost ballplayers . . .
the first dark coins of moisture fall on the diamond . . .
O Mother of Blue Mountain boys,
come to the screen door, calling, Come home! Come home!
White milkwagons are hurrying, hurrying down wet
darkening streets,
there isn’t much time!
III
I have seen them earlier than morning cross the hall,
serious-eyed and weighted down by schoolbooks,
as if alarm clocks set at premature hours
had roused them from sleep before it let them go . . .
I have seen their pencil-mark distinctions between this thing and that one,
their blue angles, sharper than gymnastics.
In Jack-o’-Lantern’s weather,
their orderly, schoolteachered troop to the Sunflower River
for an inspection of Flora along those banks
where blacks in white shifts held springtime baptismals, Ha, ha! — shouting . . .
I have seen them
never less than azure-eyed and earnest
tackle
geometry problems whose Q.E.D.
is surely speechless wonder . . .
IV
Mothers’ sorrow
grievously is thorned
by shreds of arctic light through dark pine branches,
halting the morning
with hawk-bone print of heaven.
The weather, as ever,
is clearing again, with shreds of blue and vapor
appearing among dark branches . . .
O Madonna,
aged by unequal sorrows but clothed as ever in silk, blown,
cherry-printed,
I summon thee now,
clothed as sorrow is in snow and snow.